


Polestar

by Only_1_Truth



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: 00Q Festival 2017, Angst with a Happy Ending, Complete, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, Fics spans generations, Hence the major character death warning, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M, Madness, Non-history compliant, Overstimulation, Q Whump, Rape/Non-con Elements, Reincarnation, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, This fic is not for the faint of heart so please read tags, Torture, graphic depictions of deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-22
Packaged: 2018-12-02 22:12:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11518554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Only_1_Truth/pseuds/Only_1_Truth
Summary: Q learned quite quickly that he wasn't like other people - that he lived and died like everyone else, but remembered every lifetime before like pages in a never-ending book.  He also learned quite quickly what people did with other people who were different.  The one thing that made Q's many lives bearable, though, was the one soul that returned in every lifetime: James.There was only one problem.James returned, time and again, just like Q did.  Same blue eyes, same golden hair, same devasating smile and penchant for trouble.  But James never remembered a bit of it - each life for him was his first life, and he therefore had no idea why Q would always trust him like a polestar, and grieve for him like Pompeii.





	1. Polestar, Pompeii

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tsuyu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tsuyu/gifts).



> I'm not kidding when I say that you should read the tags - this is one of the darkest fics I've written, as it stemmed from watching 'Cloud Atlas' and then writing about 90% of this fic after midnight in an angst-fueled fury. You'll also not that this fic is gifted to the lovely and incredible Tsuyu who (if you know her) is a veritable goddess of angst. I can't hope to come close to her level of angsty stories - but this is for her. 
> 
> (I also promise that I fix what I break in the end. Because Q deserves it.)

“Some of us were born to grow wings, and some of us to sprout roots,” the dexterous fingers wrote out in a careful, elegant script.  They paused, then finished with a drag of charcoal, “Perhaps that’s why you always forget, and I always remember.”

~^~

Q had known that he was different from the first time he was born.  The main reason he knew this was because he was viscerally aware, by the age of five, that this was not actually the first time he’d been born, but the second.  He kept seeing things, knowing things, all in flashes of deja vu, and while he was always proven right - like when he recalled the old castle built at the end of the valley, even if he remembered it bright and new, not crumbling and old - he didn’t precisely earn awe for his knowledge.  Scorn and fear came faster.  

Q’s second life ended when he was declared a witch, and he vowed never to reveal again what he knew, and that he somehow kept being reborn with the same eyes, the same face, the same gangly limbs - and the same memories, strung together like a string the Fates couldn’t snip.  

Q broke that vow when he met Sir James.  For the third time.  He recalled him with the force of a thunderclap shuddering through his chest, as if the sight of those winter-sky blue eyes was a falling star that had hit and shattered him.  He saw the armored knight in front of him, and remembered the farmboy before (shouldering the plough horse and crooning to it, so that it behaved, and followed his whim as docilely as a massive hooved kitten) and the hunter before that (shoulders made broader by a wolf’s-pelt cloak, thick white fur that denied the snow and made his eyes look like ice when they flashed about watchfully).  Q couldn’t help it.  He ran forward, spoke…

And was crushed and shattered again, as he remembered another thing.  

Another repetition.  

James didn’t remember, just like he never remembered.  

Q ended that life a pariah, too, although he exiled _himself_ this time - the memory of his last death was still too fresh, and he feared another death just like it if people noticed he was different.  He found that he still woke up clawing at his clothing, sure that it was full of hot embers and flames that wouldn’t let go.  It wasn’t until Q’s fourth life that he was even able to stand the smell of cooking meat without feeling nauseous.  

Sir James found Q’s staunch avoidance of meat funny.  Because despite Q’s first outburst of seeming insanity in running up to him like a long-lost friend, the blond-haired man wasn’t put off.  He seemed to think Quintillus Albin quite a funny sort of fellow - perhaps a bit mad, but more deserving of a good laugh than a good hanging.  Still, Q’s fear of hanging (or worse, should something else about his memories slip past his unguarded lips) caused him to draw away, and he only knew James and his charming smile, his already legendary swordsmanship, and his rolling laugh for a few months.  It took dying alone in a monastery to realize that nothing in the world shone quite as brightly as the star that had kept him company in lives before.  

That star with pale-blue eyes continued to reappear in every lifetime, although Q got better at handling it.  There was still that urge to run up to him, to spill everything like a hemorrhaging wound, the urge so strong that it was like fingers hooked right through his ribs every time.  But he got better at digging his heels in, at steeling himself and taking a deep breath whenever that ‘first time’ came again and again, when a blond head turned, and it had those same blue eyes and ruggedly handsome face he knew so well.  Like Q, he always came back looking the same.  

Q didn’t know what lifetime it was that he realized he loved this man.  It took a bit, but he often looked back and wondered if it had been inevitable.  After all, he had noticed no one else who traveled with him from lifetime to lifetime, and even if James never showed an inkling of recollecting his reincarnations, that still made him the closest thing to a constant that Q had in life - and how could one not love that?  For the generations leading up to that realization, Q definitely stuck to James (or whatever name he was wearing at the time; if Q weren’t getting smarter with each reincarnation, he’d have had a hard time keeping the names straight) like a bur to a collie’s coat, in whatever capacity he was able.  Sometimes that meant a squire (he was terrible at that; it required hand-eye coordination, more often than not), sometimes as a scribe that loitered constantly in the household (sometimes he got hired there permanently), and sometimes as nothing more or less than some young fool who was willing to go along with whatever trouble James had tumbled into this time.  Sometimes Q wondered if there were more traits being passed on besides James’s appearance, as if Fate thought Q somehow needed more ways to recognize the man because of Q’s perpetual bad eyesight (another recurring trait): traits such as James’s impeccable ability to see danger and run right towards it.  

Sometimes Q couldn’t get him out of it.  

It was the pain of losing James too young, too many times, that cued Q in on the fact that he loved James in a ways that went beyond comrades, because he didn’t think that he could hurt this deeply even for a brother.  Or maybe it was because the pain was sharper, keener.  Was the death of a brother like a punch to the solar plexus - and the death of a dear love like a stab that went clean through the heart?  

Holding James tight to his chest in the sands of Jerusalem, with the sun turning the world around them as red and damned bloody gold as James’s hair, Q cried as if all of the strings of his heart had been spun out of him like glass threads and shattered.  

Unfortunately, at about the same time Q came to terms with the fact that he loved James in more ways than brotherly or familial, he lived in a time when it was not allowed.  In a way, it was a shame, because in earlier lives, he might have gotten away with some homosexual affection, if he’d managed to find reciprocal feelings in James.  Sadly, by the time James had traded in broadswords for decorative rapiers (or at least they were meant to be decorative, but James still managed to get challenged to duels - and win them), and Q was dressing in sharp waistcoats and learning the wonders of good eyesight with good spectacles, homophobia was a very real and growing sentiment (even if the term took longer to catch on).  It tore something ragged and aching in Q’s chest to grow up and learn the ways of this new life, and realize that his heart did not conform to what society said it should.  Still, he met James, same as always, and god if the man didn’t look gorgeous in his vest and sleeves, trousers hugging his arse.  It was a very good lifetime, in Q’s records, if he ignored the warring feelings of self-disgust and absolutely smitten love he felt the entire time.  He died as Bond’s second in a duel in that lifetime, all over a girl James had slept with, because he was stupid that way, and Q loved him anyway.  James was the star that stayed with him, even as Q’s lungs stopped working and his heart stopped beating, and the whole sky went dark…

~^~

“It’s the darkness in between that I can’t stand,” the hand wrote, quill scratching pensively, “Even though it happens every time, it’s like I forget that it will end.  It swallows me up and I’m terrified, terrified like a child is terrified, of that lightless lake that swallows me whole.”  The quill’s nip paused, dripping ink unheeded on the page, and the hand shook slightly as it added, “I think that had I a mouth at those times, I would scream for you.  Anything to bring a bit of light, and remind me that it doesn’t all end.”  A swift, fervent underline of the last four words, as if that could root them in reality.

~^~

The first time that Q killed himself was a few generations after realizing that he was irrevocably in love with a man who would probably never - not in a million lifetimes - love him back.  It was a sad time in history, with a lot of sickness and death, and it choked Q despite (or perhaps because of) his knowledge that even the most brutal end wasn’t really the end for him.  In that lifetime, Q met James right after losing his own family to fever, and was feeling the hurt all over again of losing people that had birthed and raised and loved him.  They didn’t follow him through lifetimes, but they still meant something to him each time.  

And James - a doctor at the time, one of the most incongruous jobs the warlike man had ever had, Q recalled thinking - had comforted him and held him, and it was the closest thing to returned love that Q had yet tasted.  

And he couldn’t have it and it killed him.  Seeing James, as handsome as the day was long even as the suffering around him put hardness in his eyes and lines around his eyes, courting and then marrying a woman while Q pined with a kind of secrecy that came from too much practice…  That actually killed Q slowly for years, until James and his wife moved away, and Q knew that he could end his pain without hurting James at the same time.  He’d have never done it if James were still nearby and watching.

That was a low point in Q’s many lives, when he felt like he sat in a grave so deep that he could see no stars.  He slit his wrists while praying to whatever god was out there - to whatever god had done this to him - praying that he wouldn’t come back, because he couldn’t hurt like this anymore.  

For generations after that, Q avoided James.  Like the pain of being burned unto death, these pains of the heart lingered, and Q wondered if he’d broken some rule, somehow, by taking his own life.  It was like he came back hollow.  For some of the lives after that, Q lived an empty life, and shut out the north star that was James.  To accomplish this he used alcohol, drugs - whatever he could get his hands on.  He still had the wisdom of ages in his head and a memory that defied any technology the world was building, but he tore it all down to shambles in his head, because…  Because James was like the worst drug: a high that Q was addicted to even though he’d never truly had it.  

But James found him, even there, three whole generations into a wasted stupor that was just another kind of suicide.  

Q couldn’t stop his brain from working, couldn’t stop his dreams from asking, ‘ _When will we find James in this lifetime?  When will we feel the hooks of him within our very flesh_?’  They were making up a new drug every day, it seemed, but every time Q killed himself one way, it left him leery of doing it that way again.  Suicide was a sweet release until you remembered it in picture-perfect clarity later on, from the utter agony of oxygen-loss as a noose took its slow hold, to the sick method of death by overdose, in which he recalled vomiting all over himself and choking to death on it.  It still wasn’t as bad as death by fire, though - that memory would never leave, although Q had long-since stopped associating the smell of hamburger with his own roasted flesh - but all those methods of death made Q squeamishly shy away after one try.  He had to get creative if he wanted to end it all, and it was hard to be creative when he knew that his only prize was to go into darkness, stay there awhile, then awake once again, a child with slowly-returning memories.  

This time, Q put an advertisement out in the newspaper.  The world was still pretty homophobic, but when Q put out the advert, he wasn’t really thinking about the social backlash - he was just advertising his clear and reckless desire to be fucked by anyone who turned up at his flat.  Why?  Because he’d seen a set of blue eyes yesterday, and they’d struck him across the musty dance-floor and the pounding music and all the world had gone as still and silent as a destroyed city after a natural disaster.  That was what James did to him, and Q didn’t know how to be Pompeii anymore.  He wasn’t strong enough.  

Q didn’t know what he was hoping for.  To be hurt.  To be infected with that disease, AIDS, that everyone was talking about.  To be killed.  He requested that any caller bring something to liven up the evening with, so he was pretty high by the time the first bloke left - some fellow far older than Q’s twenty-three, and rough and grunting and careless, and almost enough to take Q out of his head.  High as a kite wasn’t a bad way to go, Q reflected, as he lay sprawled and used on his bed, and watched with a dopey smile as the man cleaned out his wallet before leaving.  Q actually had a hazy thought that that man was one of his professors at Uni, a realization that would hurt him later, when he was awake and sober enough to care.  

Maybe someone else came, after that.  Q didn’t remember.  Everything spun, and everything was made of light and color like an explosion he was at the center of; his body hummed and his brain took the night off, and it was lovely.  

So lovely, in fact, that maybe no one else came before he heard a scuffle outside his door, some shouting, and then silence.  

Followed by a young man with eyes like a new winter sky and tousled golden hair stepping through his door, and closing it quietly behind him.  And looking at Q with something too complicated in his eyes for Q to comprehend in his current condition.  

Q laughed at him, bright and utterly out of his mind, like colored glass tinkling to earth after a stained glass window shattered.  But Q had taken a mess of things that made him horny, too, so he ended up rolling off the bed and staggering over to the newest caller, falling into him and using that momentum to push James against the wall.  In Q’s mind, though, this wasn’t James - this couldn’t be James, because if it was, then this was going to hurt like frost-bite through his very guts - no, this was just another fucker here to do what Q’s advert had asked, and with that thought firmly in what was left of his mind, Q sealed their lips together in a rough, sloppy kiss.  At first, he got nothing in return, and whimpered so piteously that James belatedly responded, tongue slipping out, sliding like hesitant caress across Q’s lower lip.  

“I saw you-” Q heard James pant, when they broke for air, “Yesterday, I saw you at the club, and-”  

“Don’t talk,” Q insisted.  Damn, he didn’t want to talk.  He’d insisted on no talking, because he didn’t want anything but to be used and abused until he wasn’t a person anymore, until he was just a thing with no ties and no responsibility and no feelings.  No past, present, or endless future.  “Just… just let me make it good,” he pleaded, mostly slurred, and somehow made it to his knees by using James’s body for balance as he slid down it.  

The first bloke… and maybe the second, if Q’s wrecked (but usually sharp) memory could be trusted… had made Q suck him off, and Q was actually pretty good at it.  He’d lived enough lives in homophobic time periods that he felt self-disgust like a cancer buried deep within his memory, but he’d been trying to excise it, even if his means of doing so were brutal.  Sex with other men, oral or otherwise, was a kind of punishment for having loved James so many times when everyone called it a mortal sin.  Now, Q put those ‘punishments’ to good use, unzipping James’s trousers before he could bloody start talking again and nuzzling against his pants and cock beneath in a way he knew men liked.  

Above Q, James swayed and groaned like Q had ripped something out of him, and Q felt like he’d break upon the painful shape of his own smile.  He got James’s cock out with hands that were a bit more clumsy than he’d have liked, but knew that no one had really cared about finesse before, just his hot, tight mouth, his throat to fuck into.  With no mind left for teasing, Q swallowed James down quickly, pulling off and pushing forward again, all the while letting his hands rest loosely against his own thighs because he never intended to hold anyone back.  This was punishment, after all, for whatever… for whatever he’d done to deserve all of these lives alone.  Fucking _alone_ , because James didn’t ever remember him.  

Q felt the first jerk of James’s hips and prepared for the rough thrusts that would soon hit the back of his throat.  Prepared to be used like a martyr who was always killed for some greater good he didn’t understand.  Q had lived in towns where Flagellates walked, whipping their backs bloody and craving it, and Q understood them now, as he waited with twisted, drugged, feverish desire to be face-fucked until he was raw.  Until he was empty and used up and so utterly _not Q_ anymore.  

Therefore, it was one of the single greatest shocks in all of Q’s lifetimes to feel a hand - not on his hair, to instinctively hold him still and impale - but on his jaw, so gently cradling it, as if it might ease the weight of Q’s very head and all the wicked thoughts in it.  

Q felt the urge to sob, suddenly, as those fingers - always calloused, as if James couldn’t live a single life without doing something that endangered or roughened his hands - gently stroked his throat, warm and soothing.  Q could hear James pulling in shuddering gasps, proving he wasn’t immune to the ecstasy of having his cock sucked, but he was showing such self-control, such…

Tenderness.  

This James wasn’t a saint; he didn’t push Q away, or give him some speech about treating himself with more respect.  Neither did a miracle happen; he didn’t recognize Q, didn’t speak his name or say, “I know you.”  But he guided Q’s head as a falconer might guide a new hawk’s head into a hood when it was scared and screaming.  Q still tongued Bond’s cock, swallowed it down, but there was no mad thrusting, no yanked hair, no choking as his gag-reflex was put through its paces.  Instead, Bond’s body shuddered with the effort of staying gentle and still, and succeeded, stroking Q’s jaw and face and then his hair as if he were something precious.  

They moved to the bed after that, and the tiny part of Q that wasn’t stoned all to hell was screaming at him to run - because this was his drug, the high he’d been chasing for lifetimes, and he was going to overdose on it.  This would ruin him.  But he tugged Bond after him anyway to his bed, and he would have let himself be fucked on top of the evidence of his last transgressions had not James had the sense of mind to growl at him and then drag the soiled blankets off and onto the floor.  Q’s room was small, and a mess, but James still seemed to fit like he was meant to be there as he pressed Q down to the bed and kissed him.  Q was smart enough even in his condition to refuse too much kissing - he just knew that some sort of bond would be created if he went too far, a connection that would sink a boat-hook right into his damnable heart, and he’d have to suffer through having it ripped out, he just knew it.  But again, instead of being put off, those blue eyes just regarded him with… with sadness… and then that mouth attached itself to his cheek, and then his jaw, and on down his body until Q gasped in shock to feel his own cock suckled into a warm and willing mouth.  

No one had ever done that for him before.  

Q cried when he came.  

~^~

He woke up the next morning with a hangover that felt like it was about to split his skull open, and he groaned, fighting to remember where he was… or even what _life_ he was in.  Who was he now…?  Quinlen Fluke?  No… that was two names ago…  He was something-Boothroyd now.  Quint.  Maybe.  

As Q lifted his hands to press against his face, groaning as his brain rebooted and helpfully supplied the massive library of data that was his past lives all the way up to the present, he felt something shift behind him, and nearly shrieked in surprise when an arm tightened around his belly.  

“...Hm?  You awake?  You feeling okay?”  James’s voice, as familiar and devastating as anything in Q’s whole universe, came groggily from right behind him.  By now, Q could guess exactly how old James was just by the pitch of his voice and strength of his arm, and guessed him to be only four years older in this reincarnation; still young, while Q felt so desolately old.  

While Q tried to deal with a multiple-drug-induced hangover and the internal immolation caused by Bond’s voice all at once, the arm around his middle squeezed again, and there were those hooks: through flesh, through bone, finding Q’s soul in a heartbeat.  “Hey?  I don’t know your name,” James’s voice was serious, and Q wanted to cry and laugh maniacally all at once, “but you were pretty messed up, so just talk to me, all right?”

And so, somehow, even as he felt his world turning to wreckage in Bond’s grip, Q did what he always did: he remembered his current name, gave in to the pull of the only star that kept coming back, and introduced himself again, “Call me Quint.”  

He’d never been more helpless than he was in those arms.  He couldn’t have left them even if someone had put a gun to his head - not even if that someone had been James.

~^~

Q lived that life for quite a long while, even if he was still pretty messed up.  By dint of reincarnating, he was hardly normal, but that didn’t mean he was immortal, and he’d taken so many drugs and done so many stupid things to himself that there were some pretty obvious repercussions - withdrawal, for example, when he tried to get clean.  But James stayed and helped.  Apparently James had seen Q that night at the pub, and a gossipy friend of a friend had been enough to connect the dots, somehow, just in time for Q’s advert in the paper to appear.  It seemed that James wasn’t entirely sure why he’d answered the advert that night, and Q didn’t ask, because he knew better than anyone that James liked to thread fine lines between sinners and saints in many of his lives - and that the strings that tied them together were strange and unpredictable.  

Whatever James had thought when he’d come to Q’s flat - to save and rescue, or to add to the mayhem - it had all become something else.  

Q didn’t know what to do with it, and he felt like a husk that fire had hollowed out.  Simply put, he’d somehow found some measure of James’s affections… but didn’t know what to do with it.  James didn’t seem to, either.  They fucked, yes - awkwardly and shyly at first, like two boys who had never seen another naked body before, but then more surely and hungrily as lust took over - but Q still had too many lives behind him of suicide and unrequited love, and he just couldn’t let anyone in, not even James.  

Honestly, Q wasn’t sure why James put up with this moody, twitchy, oft-relapsing version of him.  James didn’t even always want sex from him - sometimes, James said no, when Q flew at him in a fit of self-hatred like before.  That always made Q furious, and their fights were epic.  But somehow, it always ended with James coming back, even if he’d stalked out the night before with Q throwing a lamp after him.  And Q always ended up huddled in the corner, curled in on himself like he wanted to implode into his own sick ribcage as he cried and sobbed and asked himself why he broke things he wanted.  

That was one of the few lifetimes that Q remembered… growing almost old… sort of together.  Apparently, with Q hovering constantly at the edge of self-destruction, James’s recurrent instinct to risk his own life was sated by proxy, and didn’t get him into any trouble until he was conscripted.  

Q wasn’t surprised when he learned that James had been killed in action.

And strangely enough, while the pain was deeper and broader - like an entire ocean beneath and around him - it wasn’t enough to end him this time.  Q lived out the rest of his life alone, in a sort of smothering silence that made other people stop, look at him, and feel pity without really knowing why.  

 

 


	2. Cutthroat razor; Carthage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It starts with a cutthroat razor and ends in Carthage...
> 
> Or the chapter where Q finally meets James Bond, 007, so achingly familiar and full of the best kinds of trouble - he's even worth getting on a plane for, when the agent needs some help in Macao. That help goes delightfully further than acting as 007's barber, but fate has never smiled on Q for long, and it's getting harder and harder to act like a normal person.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You'll recognize a bit of canon in this chapter, liberally twisted to meet my wishes ;) Also, I didn't say this in the last chapter, but one of the scenes was drawn from 'London Spy,' which some of you may know featured Ben Whishaw as well...

“I don’t know why I keep this diary,” the ballpoint pen rolled across the paper, one of those new-fangled things for left-handers, “Some of the pages are so old they should positively fall apart if I re-read them, and probably belong in a museum for the paper alone.  I suppose I keep writing because I need something besides myself that remembers.”

~^~

The reincarnation of Q after that disastrous life where he died in a plane-crash, James took a bloody long time to turn up in his life, so Q decided to make the most of it.  For all that he’d developed into quite a genius throughout all of his lives, he’d rarely used that skillset, but figured… why not?  It was the age of computers, so his vast range of random knowledge would hardly be inexplicable anymore, and he hadn’t heard of anyone being burned as a witch in decades, at least in London.  Plus, waiting for James was hard, and after that first lifetime where he’d slept with James, he’d realized that he couldn’t use alcohol or drugs or what-have-you to make the waiting seem shorter.  

 _Damn_ the bit of hope that lifetime had given him, hope that he could have something less dysfunctional with James if he could just stay clean and sober and wait for it.  

Joining MI6 was something of an accident.  Learning computers had become a game when he was still young - even before all of his lifetime upon lifetime of memories had started to filter in - and it wasn’t long before he’d become quite an enthusiastic master of them.  And perhaps he still had some bad habits left over from past lives lived poorly, because as soon as he got bored with what he could legally do with a computer, he started looking covetously at the illegal stuff.

And ended up hacking MI6.  

And getting hired as Quartermaster.  

When Q met James - for the first time again - in the art museum, he was as composed as he could be.  He’d seen ‘ _James Bond_ ’ on the roster and had had his miniature heart-attack then, bursting out in a peal of delighted and at the same time horrified laughter as he’d seen that in this lifetime, James was a 00-agent.  Of course he was.  Of course he’d been declared dead multiple times already - Q was just glad that every time, including this latest time, he’d come back.  “Maybe I’ll enjoy having a James who makes a habit of resurrection,” Q mused, a supernova of happiness burning away in his chest, because he never could help it.  Even in the darkest of lifetimes, the first seconds in which he saw James, or saw his name, or learned that he existed then, too, Q’s chest threatened to crack open with a kind of happiness that had no equal.  

So, by the time Q saw that blond head of hair from behind, those broad shoulders, that familiar posture slouched with tiredness, Q was able to take a breath, collect himself, and recall that this time around, his James was very hurt and broken.  ‘ _Handle with care_ ,’ Q reminded himself, conveniently forgetting that he himself should have had that sign hung around his soul centuries ago.  Gathering the professionalism he’d wrapped around himself in this lifetime, Q approached.  

And was secretly delighted to be grumbled at and snarked at and underestimated.  

Q had many lifetimes of assisting James in whatever capacity he was needed, so while MI6 seemed startled by a Quartermaster who was so interested in being hands-on, it felt like old hat to Q.  He had more agents to worry about than James, of course, and took his job very seriously - and was thankful for the cover of ‘aloof, stiffly professional boffin,’ because it meant he could look James in the eye and joke about his life even when he was terrified that the next mission would take James from him.  

Again.  

It always happened.  

Still, Q had learned… probably by his third or fourth lifetime… that getting James to turn from his reckless ways was like getting a leopard to change its spots, to make the man be anything other than what he was meant killing him twice: killing the soul before killing the body.  So instead of trying to curb the man’s actions, Q simply armed the man however he could.  James was a sword: its purpose, plain and simple, was to _cut_.  And if that was true, then Q was a shield.  

Sadly, being a shield meant kitting out an agent who was not only incredibly destructive to all around him but, at this moment, in another country.  

“I could go-” Eve (a delightful woman, even if she’d shot Q’s secret beloved off a train) offered cautiously.

“No.”  Q stood.  “I’ll deliver the kit.  With James’s record with tech, he’ll need the best person possible to explain the new items in his kit and make it clear that he can’t just blithely toss it all into an active volcano.”

Eve smirked.  “I don’t think he’s near any of those.”

“He’d find one.”  His James was resourceful.  Something that had impressed him and driven him insane for lifetimes.  It was funny, sometimes, how Q could love a man and at the same time want to strangle him so often.  This reincarnation was already proving particularly maddening.  

“You’ll have to go by plane to get there, Q.  And I know that your file notes a phobia of flying.”

“I’ll handle it.  That’s what Xanax is for,” Q replied in clipped tones, already starting  to pack his things.  

“You never did say,” Eve said slowly, her dark eyes entirely too keen, “why you’re afraid of flying.” She leaned against his desk, as patient as a cat by a bird-feeder, replete in the knowledge that a bird would come.

Q smirked dryly.  “Phobias are illogical by definition,” he demurred, then paused, and decided, ‘ _What the hell_?’ and added in a joking tone, “Maybe I fell out of the sky in a former life.”

Of course, Eve left it at that, and Q was left to finish packing up before going to Medical to get some drugs for his nerves that he’d most definitely need.  “The things I do for you, James,” he muttered angrily to himself as he boarded the plane and tried not to vomit.  He had indeed fallen out of the sky in his last life, and the memory was still fresh.

~^~

When Q got to Bond’s hotel, he was feeling better from his flight; there were certain bonuses to long cab rides with nothing to do but sit back, breathe, and remind himself that he was on the ground and blessedly alive.  Therefore, he had enough playfulness in him to call, “Room service,” when he got to James’s door.  

He knew that in this life, James was a trained spy with hair-trigger survival instincts, but it wasn’t enough to make him even the slightest bit wary - even though he was one-hundred percent sure that the man behind said door was even now readying a weapon of some kind.  Q simply blinked blandly at the peephole, and was rewarded by the door swinging open seconds later as James realized that it was a friend, not a foe, behind it.  

How much of a friend, he’d never know.  

“I didn’t order anything.  Not even you,” James joked, all charm, cocky grin, and - to Q’s unending distraction, nothing on but a towel wrapped snug but low around his hips.  James had a gun, too, but it was hard to look away from the rest of James to even notice it.  

Somehow, from somewhere in his brain, Q’s own survival instincts kicked in, the instincts that had kept him from being locked away in an insane asylum on all but one memorable occasion.  “I… ur…” he stumbled, cleared his throat, ended up looking at wickedly laughing blue eyes, and finally got out stumblingly, “I’ve got some new information.”

“Aren’t you a little bit overqualified to be delivering messages?” the 00-agent asked back, but also turned around and walked away, a wordless invitation into the opulent hotel room that James had booked himself in.  This reincarnation of James was a rather hedonistic one, but Q couldn’t find it in him to blame the man - not after all James had lived through, in this life and in the many before.  Q was quite sure, really, that he couldn’t deny James anything by this point in their long, atypical, and sadly one-sided relationship.  Q followed James in, eyes glued to his broad, bare back, doing this in order to keep his eyes from drifting down to Bond’s towel-clad arse, but instead just felt his heartstrings rip as he found himself counting scars that he hadn’t been able to stop.  This reincarnation of James had so many that it was as if he’d brought them with him from lives before, adding and adding and adding.

He wanted to touch them.  He wanted to soak up the pain in each pale knot of healed skin, because Q was the one who was supposed to be stuck with all the memories, right?  

“Q?”  James had turned without Q realizing it, and was looking at him with a curious, almost worried expression on his face.  

It took some effort for Q to put all his sadness and longing back into the adamantium box he kept it in.  “Hm?  Oh, yes,” Q stammered, then found his businesslike voice again, “I’m only the delivery boy because the information is sensitive, and because I have a new kit for you that might take some explanation.  You destroy things so swiftly, it’s almost like you don’t know the first thing about the expensive tech I’m giving you.”

Back on familiar ground now that he was being chastised - a regular occurrence between 007 and his Quartermaster - James flashed a shameless grin and replied without missing a beat, “And here I thought all of my tech came from the bottom of cereal boxes, instructions included.”

“Very funny, 007,” Q said with a patience that came from ages ago, and had arguably made him more tolerant of 007 than any person alive, “Now, I came first and foremost to warn you that whoever attacked MI6 and stole the list has already decrypted it.  They posted the first five names on the web, and plan to post more.  You're actually quite lucky that you were declared dead when you were - you’re not even _on_ the list.  Still…”  Q frowned, because as much as he cared for James, he cared for _all_ of MI6’s agents as well.  “It’s like some sort of sadistic game.”

While Q had been talking, James had wandered back to the room’s mirrored sink, where it looked as though he’d been preparing to shave before Q had come in.  The blond-haired man had a lot of practice at keeping his cool even as things got scary and grim, so he applied shaving cream without a quiver of hesitation even as the facts were laid out.  In need of a bit of calmness and stability himself, because this was the most intimacy he’d had with James thus far in this life, Q grasped at the first thing that caught his attention, filling the quiet by saying, “Cutthroat razor?”  His eyes were on the item Bond had just picked up in his hand: an old-fashioned razor, the likes of which Q remembered from lifetimes ago.  Some of those had been pleasant lifetimes even, and allowed Q to quirk up his mouth at one side and add with Sahara dryness, “How very traditional.”

“Well, I like to do some things the old fashioned way,” James murmured back drolly, but the eyes that met Q’s in the mirror were playful.  

Q resisted the urge to smile and sigh in exasperated fondness, knowing that look so well.  James had been so many things, but never without humor.  “Sometimes the old ways are the best ways,” the Quartermaster admitted softly.  This was the closest he’d come to speaking of the past to James in centuries, and it caused a twinge of cowardly, painful fear to prick at him, sealing his lips again.  His last death via plane had been sudden and horrifying, but the one before that had been equally unpleasant for how it had been prolonged.  Fading away in an insane asylum because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut about fond - and seemingly stalkerish - memories was not the way to go, and Q knew that it could happen to him again.  Witch-burning was a thing of the past, but asylums weren’t.

Q’s retreat back into his shell was stopped suddenly by James pausing and then lowering the razor he’d been bringing to his cheek.  There would never be a day that Q was not quietly mesmerized by James just _moving_ , and the state of undress right now wasn’t helping, so Q was only able to stand and stare like a deer caught in the headlights as the agent, for no reason that Q could see, turned and offered the razor to him.  Q looked from the razor to James’s expression (Bond’s expression: this was a new man, one that Q didn’t know yet, but one who’d already lived nearly half a lifetime without him, surrounded by danger and betrayal), noting the guarded eyes but the faint, anticipant smile.  As of yet, Q couldn’t read this James very well, but he sensed something complicated in that look: something curious, something eager, something like a young cat stepping out on an old limb.  Q reached out and gently wrapped his fingers around the proffered razor, a little zing of connection going through his flesh as this also had him wrapping his hand around Bond’s.  “Are you putting your life in my hands?” Q asked, trying to match James’s devil-may-care humor, but feeling the way his voice went soft and weighted instead.  

“Testing your competency,” James shot back immediately, all cheek.  He added, because apparently this James was an arse, “I’m pretty sure this razor is older than you are.”

“I’m older than I look,” Q gave back a small, secret smile, and took the instrument into a hand that had weighed such an instrument generations before.  

For all the world as trustworthy as a child who’d never known harm, James led the way to a chair a few paces away, sinking into it and watching Q and the razor expectantly.  He had the gall to keep teasing, too, even as Q approached like a puppet, helpless to ignore its golden strings, “Old or not, you hardly look threatening.”

“Even with a straight razor?”  Q hesitated only a moment, standing in front of James, then folded his lanky legs until he could kneel in front of him.  His agent leaned forward accommodatingly, his white-coated cheeks and jaw within easy reach and his keen eyes as wicked and watchful as an alleycat’s.  It made Q shudder, afraid for a moment that those eyes would see right through him; through the thin gauze he threw over the massive collection of his lives, which sat like a hidden train-wreck just behind his smile; through the veneer of professionalism that was already wearing thin, as he reached up with one hand to scrap the naked blade across James’s cheek and reached with the other to cup the back of the agent’s head.  The softness of the shorter, blond strands at the base of James’s skull was so familiar, and for a moment it made Q forget how to breathe.  

He’d had centuries to learn how to hide that, fortunately, and scraped off more stubble and shaving cream with a skilled stroke and nothing but focus in his demeanor.  ‘ _I haven’t done this for you in too long_ ,’ he wanted to say.  Instead he said, “I’ve been working on following the electronic trail of whoever is posting those names.  It’s slow going, but I think I’m making progress.”  Q shifted closer, losing himself in his task, feeling like he was finally sliding back into his skin after thirty-odd years of not quite fitting.  Nothing ever fit right until James came along.  His heart gave a rabbit-kick in his chest as he knelt up closer, feeling James’s knees against his hips.  Somehow, despite that, he managed to further discuss how the hunt for their target was going from Q’s end.  From there, Q went to discussing MI6 in general as it recovered, and eventually ended up talking about his own current projects.  He couldn’t hide his enthusiasm for that last topic, and had to watch the straight razor a little bit more closely when James started chuckling at him.  Q was pretty sure that the Quartermaster of MI6 would have been miffed, but the Q who shared many an embarrassing story with James was already drunk on the presence of another soul as old as his.  Even if the other soul didn’t know it.  

James Bond didn’t recall having previous lives, but his body did, insofar as it had a habit of collecting some of the same old scars.  It was a phenomenon that Q had noted centuries ago, and now, it was habit to curve the razor ever-so-carefully as he came to to edge of James’s jaw.  Focused on what his hands were doing, and on explaining what he was doing with the next generation of palm-reader handguns, Q missed the way that Bond stilled - just as Q deftly shaved around a scar hidden along the agent’s jawline.  Q looked up in time to see 007’s blue eyes narrowed on him unreadable.  

“I saw the scar at the museum,” Q lied, explaining away his skill, curling his fingers gently under the point of James’s chin to tilt his head back and distract him from things a skinny young boffin had no right knowing.  “Keep still,” he cautioned as he went to shave away the last remaining cream, along the column of James’s throat, “This is the tricky part.”

An intricate sort of silence wove its way between them, filled by the rasping noise of the razor as it moved along vulnerable skin like a lover’s teeth.  

Q tried and failed not to remember the times he’d done that before, teeth and all.  

He also tried and failed not to remember when James had been a pub bouncer two generations ago and had been killed by a broken glass bottle across the throat.  

“There,” Q said, wiping the cutthroat razor as if to remove the second memory.  He didn’t always have a lot of time with James, and he refused to ruin it by fretting over past lives, no matter how the memories crowded around his head like a murder of crows.  “All finished.  Now you look like one of Her Majesty’s best-”

Really, Q should have seen it coming, from the light in James’s glacial blue eyes, to the shifting of the muscles in his bare torso, to the way he’d been coercing Q closer and closer from the moment he’d recognized him at the door.  After all this time, Q arguably knew Bond better than Bond did, but every reincarnation of James was just a bit different, as if fate enjoyed seeing Q, its favorite toy, caught off guard.  Therefore, Q was caught quite perfectly off guard when James leaned forward the second the razor was down, and pressed their mouths together.  

Of course, even when surprised, Q’s body had a few reflexes that never turned off either.  

One of them included immediately returning any kiss given to him by the only person that followed him - or that he followed - from life to endless life.  Q’s heart had time for one skipped beat before the dark-haired boffin was pressing back into the kiss, making a soft, not-quite-wounded noise like a torn breath at the back of his throat.  

The kiss went on for a few more beats, until James pulled back and smirked shamelessly, and Q had the wit to stutter, “I didn’t know you were bisexual.” ‘ _In this lifetime_.’

“And I didn’t know you were either,” was 007’s all-too-canny retort, still smiling like the cat who had eaten the canary and its entire fuzzy flock.  

To be fair, James had an annoying penchant for being straight, or at least susceptible enough to peer pressure that he was never so forward with Q.  Not being the one to make the first move was strangely shocking, and Q’s vocal cords continued on autopilot as he remained kneeling between Bond’s knees, although now he needed to press his hands to Bond’s powerful thighs to keep his balance.  “I’m not,” Q said, then gave his head a hard shake, squeezing his eyes shut and elaborating, “I’m gay,” because that answer sounded better than ‘ _I’m James-sexual_.’  Q rarely ever slept with anyone else, at least not with any real desire.  Opening his eyes again and laboriously collecting his scattered brain, Q frowned and accused, “That was an awfully bold move for a man who didn’t know whether he was going to get kissed back or slapped.”

“How does that phrase go?” James pretended to muse, because bloody hell, the man was insufferable this time around.  Looking up at the ceiling even as one of his hands curled gently around Q’s arm, thumb stroking the inside of his elbow slowly, James recited, “ ‘It’s better to ask forgiveness’-”

“-‘Than permission,’ so I’ve heard,” Q managed to stay stern for a few more seconds before thirty-two years of loneliness got the better of him and he found his body swaying forward.  Damn, this was going to hurt if he found out James was just playing with him.  Considering the fact that they’d only met once prior to this, Q was in no way dreaming of some big emotional connection being revealed, but he rather hoped that this was one of the lifetimes where James liked to fuck him from time to time.  Those were the best lives, and not just because the sex was good.  It often was - and definitely would be this time, if 007’s file was anything to go by - but even if James had been the most abysmal bed-partner in history, Q knew that he’d still love it, because a body yearned to come home no matter what the house looked like.  

And James felt like home, so when James’s eyes flicked to Q’s mouth and he murmured huskily, “So, should I ask permission this time, or will you forgive me again?” Q didn’t even have to think.

“No forgiveness or permission necessary,” he breathed, and leaned forward, welcoming the chapped lips against his, the little nips and bites, and eventually the heavy, muscular, utterly familiar body that took him to bed and pressed him down against the sheets and made every second of Q’s very long lives worthwhile.  It didn’t matter to Q in the slightest that this was just an agent looking for a warm, willing body to take the edge off before a dangerous mission, because Q was happy to at least be on the list of people that James turned to - the list of mouths he licked into, collarbones he put bruises on, ribcages he held almost crushingly tight as he climaxed.  

Meanwhile, James was on Q’s list.  It was a short list.  It contained no one else.  No one else that he didn’t have to erase between lifetimes.    

It was the list of people Q loved with every inch and corner of his heart.  

~^~

It was while Q was in Macau assisting James that he learned one of his properties had been broken into.  Not his flat - one of his other properties, an old place he’d owned for decades.  Q had learned early on that if he wanted to keep track of his journeys through different lifetimes, he had to have a touchstone to go back to that wouldn’t be sold to his next of kin the moment he died.  So he’d started keeping at least one property under a false name with automatic funds set up to keep it his, and every time he reincarnated, he checked in, and changed paperwork as necessary.  He left instructions for the place’s upkeep, and only really cared about the little downstairs room where he hid his diaries, adding to them from time to time.  His most recent writings, penned when the centuries grew too heavy and the silence of his singular knowledge tried to burst through his teeth, he still had in London, and would need to be mailed with special delivery instructions.  

Or not.  It seemed as though the property had been robbed over a week ago, Q’s circuitous connection to the place causing a delay in the message.  

Q didn’t have time to deal with all of that, because he was too busy running the comms for James - one night in the sheets had become somehow a more prolonged connection, because apparently Q had been more impressive than he thought as he spouted technobabble.  James had wanted him to stay in Macao and help, and now Q was beginning to wonder if he’d survived a plane-ride only to be killed by Komodo dragons.  

Q’s selection of random skills sadly did not include giant-lizard-handling, but thankfully, James seemed better equipped.  “You couldn’t have offered more assistance?” James panted into the comm-link afterwards, sounding winded and exasperated but quite alive, which Q could also see from his his place at the railing, where he’d been on the verge of jumping in himself.  Thankfully, that wasn’t needed.  Q had never been the physical sort.   _Willing_ to put his life on the line, yes, but never physically good at it.  

“You seemed like you had it handled,” Q replied with utter calm, squeezing the railing until he was white-knuckled because the quiver in his hands was too great to hide otherwise.  ‘ _Dammit, James, why do you keep picking lifestyles that keep you closer to Death than to_ me?’  “Now, I believe that girl, Severine,” Q went on, because that was what the Quartermaster of MI6 would do, “had some instructions for you if you survived?”

~^~

Q was ready to skin James alive by the time the 00-agent returned home, their target in tow.  Of course, by that point, Q had been forced to endure _three_ more aerial flights (which was just about the _last_ thing he wanted to do in this lifetime), because James Bond had managed to get himself captured and taken to an island only approachable by chopper.  Locating James by his radio had been easy in comparison to sitting in that flying contraption as it whirred and roared to Silva’s island, and to say that Q was ready to murder the man he stupidly loved was an understatement by the time they all landed.  James had looked mildly surprised (and greatly amused) when he’d seen Q’s pale, stiff, glowering expression in the belly of the first helicopter on the ground, forcing Q to admit between teeth that ached from being clenched this whole time, “I’ve a phobia of flying.  You’re lucky you’re worth it.”  And Q refused to say anything more.  

But he’d gotten a teensy bit less murderous when James decided to sit next to him during the flight back.  

In the end, Agent 007 was the man of the hour for bringing MI6’s attacker, Raoul Silva, back to London in chains.  The transfer from the choppers to a proper plane went smoothly, Q drugged himself to the gills to survive the third and final flight hopefully of this lifetime, and there were congratulations all around as they all returned to MI6.  

“Did you really have to be so…”  Q searched for the word as he stood alongside James outside the bullet-proof cage Silva was now trussed up and being held in, “... _Flashy_ about it all?”

“You were the one who gave me the radio - and who then came to get me with a whole armada of aerial back-up,” James returned with a twitch of his mouth, and that low, teasing tone that never ceased to make something in Q’s stomach flip.  He _missed_ James when he was gone, and always felt like he was getting used to that deep voice all over again - while simultaneously fearing the next time it would leave him.  He’d thought that it was about to leave him back on that island, with Silva and his goons.  It made Q want to sway into James’s body heat, but they were in the middle of MI6, and besides, Silva had for some reason lost interest in M - who was standing right up next to the cage - and was instead staring at Q with unsettling intensity.  

“We should go out for a drink after this,” James’s voice startled Q away from the penetrating, almost gloating look in Silva’s eyes, getting the bespectacled boffin to turn and stare stupidly at James instead, who was watching him with amusement from the corner of one blue eye.  

“I beg your pardon?  What did you say?”

“I said I should have fed you to the Komodo dragons at Macau - what did you think I said, Q?”  Bond jostled Q’s shoulder companionably and then relented in warm exasperation, “I said that we should go out for drinks.  I _know_ I deserve a drink or five after all this, and you deserve at least a decent shot of whiskey after flying, all things considered.”

“I need something that will make me forget I was ever in the air to begin with,” Q grumbled, meaning it.  The discussion between M and Silva was getting more heated - something about betraying agents and leaving them to die.  

“I might be able to oblige you-” James started to say with enough innuendo in his voice to make Q’s lower abdominal muscles contract… but then Silva went and snarled something about cyanide, and it turned out that half of his face was apparently a prosthetic, which he felt the need to remove in public.  

Q had seen some incredibly dramatic individuals in his lifetimes, but Raoul Silva - a.k.a. Tiago Rodriguez - took the cake.  Bond’s offer to very likely fuck Q into pleasant, memory-less oblivion had to be put aside in favor of work, and things that day went downhill from there.  Still, the sex-laden tone of Bond’s voice was a highlight.  

~^~

As much as Q wanted to blame all of the drugs and plane-rides for his oversight, there was really no excusing the fact that he’d played a pivotal - if entirely unwilling and accidental - role in Silva’s escape.  The humiliation of that would have to wait, however, because James, instead of sitting around to blame Q like many people would have done, had instead proceeded to do what he did best: fix the problem.  

“I’m in a stairwell below isolation.  Do you read me, Q?”  Bond’s voice, as hard and determined as mountain stone, piped through the comms.

Q immediately answered, “I can hear you.  I’m looking for you.”  Something he had a lot more practice at than anyone would ever know; perhaps that was why he was able to add almost immediately, “Got you.  Tracking your location.”  The same determination in Bond’s voice now lined Q’s, a stalwart assuredness that he’d do what he’d always done, or die trying: be what James needed him to be.  After all, hadn’t James always been what Q needed him to be?  A tether?  A reminder that some things didn’t leave him when death washed everything else away?  “I’ve got Silva on camera.  Just keep moving forward - he’s in the underground with you.”

James was a war machine made of flesh, and it took Q’s breath away, watching him work - and knowing that he himself stood on the other end of that leash.  Or perhaps that was a bad metaphor.  Q and James were shield and sword again, as they’d been in the days before guns, and while Q would probably always be laughable with edged weaponry, he could raise hell in other ways, especially if it gave his ‘sword’ an advantage.  “Silva’s in disguise - dressed as a policeman!”

“Of course he is,” Bond growled back with a frustration that matched the crawling sensation clawing up Q’s spine, rough and uncomfortable.  “Where’s he going?”

Q and his entire branch was abuzz, working to find cameras with the answers Bond needed.  “Bond,” Q cautioned even as his fingers moved a quick dance across the keys.  “James,” he repeated, because that was the name he knew, and he needed the man’s attention even as he lowered his voice, “This wasn’t a spur of the moment escape - it’s too well planned.  It must have been years in the making - the bomb, his capture, everything.”

Bond’s breath was a light pant in Q’s ears, soothing because it existed.  “I was starting to suspect the same,” Bond agreed grudgingly after a moment.  Then, suddenly, the breathing stopped, and for a second Q’s heart lurched to a halt, too, until he realized that Bond had simply withheld his breath in surprise for a second before suddenly blurting back, “I know where Silva’s going.”

“Where?”

“He’s after M, Q - didn’t you hear him?  She abandoned him.  She _destroyed_ him.”  James was moving again, swift and unstoppable, but now with purpose instead of being lead around like a fish on a line.  “He’s going for M.  Tell Tanner.  Get her out.”

Q didn’t even think to argue.  “Yes, James.”  

~^~

It had hurt, letting James run off to the middle of nowhere with M, playing paladin with no one else to guard him.  ‘ _James, you have her back, but who has yours_?’ Q wondered as he watched the little dot that was James moving across the map, out of the city.  Considering Q’s train of thought, it seemed almost supernatural that suddenly the very man he was thinking about decided to break the comm-silence right then, startling the boffin nearly out of his mind.  

“Q?  I need help.”

There was no one else around at the moment, but Q still switched the speaker to a headset, pulling it on because he sensed something in James’s voice.  “Of course you do,” he whispered back, “Why do I get a feeling this is something even more secretive than your usual spy endeavors?”

“You’re a quick study, Q,” Bond congratulated, and despite the slightly jaded tone, Q smiled at the praise.  

“I’m tracking the car.  Where are you?” Q demanded, wishing that he was a quick study on everything - such as the zigs and zags of reason this reincarnation of James kept taking.  First, kissing and sleeping with him in the hotel room after just meeting once - now, suddenly fleeing MI6 with his boss.

“I’ve got M,” James said, “We’re about to disappear.”

Q felt something lurch in his stomach, as if a string had been pulled, attached to a fishhook in his belly.  “What?”

“I need you to lay a trail of breadcrumbs-”

“James, this is insane-”

“I need you to _lay a trail of breadcrumbs_ impossible to follow for anyone but Silva,” James overrode him and repeated harshly, and Q flinched as if struck.  He was feeling his world shaking beneath him, becoming more unstable.  He felt as if he could sense the fetid breath of death hovering around this conversation, around James.  “Q, do you think you can do it?”

“Of course I can do it,” Q hissed back, not realizing that he’d entered his office until his fingers were wrapped around his desk-chair so hard they were cramping.  He felt panic crawling up his throat that was different than the anxiety he felt when flying: this panic was deeper, sicker, _meaner_.  It wasn’t just constricting his lungs, it was digging piercing claws into his heart, pumping a whole different kind of fear throughout his body.  “But like I said: this is insane.”

“You don’t even know what I’m going to do.”

James’s voice had attempted playfulness, teasing, but Q was having none of it.  This reincarnation of James could be as flippant as he wanted, but his life was still _important_ , especially to one bespectacled boffin who was getting worse, not better, at coping without him.  “Yes, I do,” Q seethed recklessly, “because I _know you_.  You can’t see a way to fight Silva here, so you’re going to change the battlefield.  God, why do you _always_ do this?”  This was going to be like Jerusalem all over again.  Like Sri Lanka.  Like Carthage.  

“What-?”

Belatedly realizing what he was saying, Q snapped his teeth together so fast that he caught the edge of his tongue between them, tasting blood in a coppery rush across his mouth.  He realized that he’d gone too far, said too much, and immediately retreated like a turtle into its shell.  “I can do it,” he calmed his tone to a subdued mumble that was a shadow of its former self, suddenly wondering if he’d be able to fix what he’d just done when and if James came back.  “I can lay your trail of breadcrumbs.  I gather that this isn’t strictly official?”

There was a long pause in which Q counted his own racing heartbeats, wondering if James would choose to follow up on Q’s inexplicable rant or stay focused on business.  Thankfully, Bond was more 007 the agent than James the man right now, and replied back after six hammering heartbeats, “Not even remotely.”

“So much for my promising career in espionage,” Q sighed, then cut the connection, because he didn’t want his mouth to run away with him again.  He set to work laying a trail to trap Silva with, even as he started making plans to leave MI6 and quietly fade away, a ghost back into the machine.  

He’d said too much and he knew it; he’d ruined what he’d had.  

~^~

Q had laid a trail that no one but Silva could follow, and had hidden it beneath enough other programs that even if someone suspected that something was going on, they wouldn’t be able to disrupt Q’s work.  Perhaps Silva had managed to outmaneuver the Quartermaster of MI6 today, but Q wasn’t about to be bested a second time - not when James’s life depended on it.  And M’s, he supposed.  But Q always had a hard time connecting with people who were, to him, terribly impermanent.  He wondered if that made him something of a psychopath, and that thought in turn made him chuckle humorlessly as he pulled on his coat and slipped silently out the back door, the security cameras already conveniently turned off so that they’d miss his progress.  

He wondered what stories they’d tell, to explain his sudden disappearance?  It would be just an absence at first - weird but not inconceivable, that he went out for some air or a drink, after his mistake with Silva’s program.  But then, when he didn’t come back, and refused to answer calls to the phone number he’d given in his contact information in his file, people would realize that something was truly amiss.  

Whatever they thought, it would be better than facing accusations of lunacy, or questions from James that he couldn’t answer without ultimately reaching the same problem: accusations of lunacy.  There was a chance that he could play off what he’d said, but the walls he’d put up to hold back the truth were cracked, and he didn’t think they’d hold.  Q shivered, getting outside, and had to close his eyes and just breathe for a second, feeling like a coward for at least the hundredth time in his life.  What was he doing?  

Running away from James.

No, no, he wasn’t doing that.  Not quite.  That’s why he’d brought his laptop, after all, and why he’d already found and hacked the new burner phone that Bond had gotten, and was already tracking the car Bond and M had switched over to.  He’d see this mission through - he’d see James home.  

He just… wouldn’t see Q when he got there.  

Because even centuries and dozens of lives later, Q remembered what it was to be burnt at the stake for being different, and he was always going to be afraid that James would be the one to put him there, and with every lifetime he got worse and worse at acting normal.  

Q was just about to disappear down the street in the direction of the tube, his thoughts forming complex algorithms for how to disappear, and how to keep James at least two steps ahead of his enemy, when he heard footsteps rush up behind him a split second before hands grabbed him.  They yanked him roughly backwards.  Q’s computer bag slipped off his shoulder, to his elbow, to the street, and in that time there was already a hand over his mouth, and he was struggling.  It took a moment to realize that there were at least two men on him, and Q put to work all of the various fighting skills that he’d picked up over his lifetimes - sadly, he’d never had the knack for fighting, and even though he managed to break free of one attacker with a move that James had actually taught him, about three lifetimes ago, Q still ended up knocked off his feet, the second form crushingly heavy on top of him.  

“Now, now, gentlemen, be careful with him,” the smooth voice from about two meters away had Q jerking his head up, fighting the gloved hand still muffling any cries for help.  Q would have forgotten to cry out entirely anyway, at least in the first few seconds as his eyes identified the speaker, seeing Raoul Silva himself standing nonchalantly just a few steps away.  Smiling that scary, knowing, almost rabid smile he’d fixed Q with back in MI6.  “I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get my hands on him, so I don’t want him damaged.  Just… help him relax.”

Q didn’t know what was going on, what was happening, and neither did he know what to think of Silva’s last sentence until he felt the sharp bite of a needle through his trouser-leg, lancing into his thigh and bringing a wave of dizziness, then heaviness, then a darkness so complete that only death would have rivaled it.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, look, is that a cliffhanger...? Take a deep breath, because this is when I set the metaphorical house on fire ('Carthage,' remember?). Angst is my kindling, and I haven't had the pleasure of writing Silva in entirely too long *evil author laugh* Next chapter should be up in 1-3 days! 
> 
> Bonus: today in the 00Q Festival is Crossover Day, so I'm going to start posting another fic, probably tonight! ^_^ Keep an eye out for 'Sciamachy' if you like stories with more fandoms than you can shake a stick at!


	3. The First Burning's Free

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Silva has Q - but he has more than that. He has a pesky amount of knowledge, and Q's world has only just begin to catch fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter actually came from a bit of poetry that I wrote this past year:  
> When will  
> the world learn:  
> we make witches  
> from the innocents  
> we burn.

“Q…  Q...”  The voice seemed to float to Q from afar, wavering and slick, like somehow his brain had lost the capacity to grasp things.  It was a befuddling and unsettling sensation, but Q tried to fight it, even as the darkness swam with eddies of darkest purple and midnight blue behind his eyelids.  

“Q…   _Quincy_...”

The name jarred Q like a livewire to his skin, startling him more quickly into full wakefulness even as confusion grappled with shock and confusion.  ‘ _Quincy?  I’m Quincy now_?’  His brain tried to orient itself around the name: Quincy Fox, born 1869 to Mrs. Lois Harrington-Fox and Mr. Gregory Fox, homemaker and newspaper editor respectively.  Uneventful childhood; excelled in the best schools his parents could get him into; met Jameson Savage after Uni but ran into some trouble when-

Q gasped, and that livewire feel transformed into a full electrocution as his brain whiplashed him from the perceived present to the real one, but not before his body felt the almost physical shock of Quincy Fox’s death relived.  Gang violence, common in that part of Ireland; trouble, which followed James no matter his present name or lot in life; Q, who couldn’t stop following along if he tried; a bullet to the gut that had killed him slowly while James… Jameson… went berserk across the room and got killed shortly thereafter.  The memory of the agony caused by stomach acid leaking out into his entire abdominal cavity somehow paled in comparison to the memory of Jameson’s unholy rage, which had started the second Q had crumpled to the floor…

“Ah, well, that’s not quite the reaction I was expecting, but every little response is telling, is it not?” the same voice that had awoken him continued, the words slick and smooth, but a bit hard to distinguish over the blood pounding in Q’s ears and the panting of his own breath as he tried to recover.  It actually took a few seconds and a few hard gasps before it sank in that he was listening to Raoul Silva, the man’s voice coming from a few meters away.  Q’s most recent memories were having a hard time sinking in past the morass of his old ones, because Q had never experienced his past and present colliding like this.  His head felt thick and slow, too full, and his body was awash with phantom aches so fierce that he couldn’t stop his muscles from clenching and shuddering, even as Q registered the chair supporting him, and rough hemp at his wrists and ankles.  Tied up then.  Q’s brain tried to recall the last time that had happened, but it felt like the meticulous library in his head was in disarray, Silva’s artfully timed use of an old name dragging out all the books of the shelves and strewing them across the floor of Q’s mind.  

“You know, I really was hoping to get you _and_ M,” Silva went on, sounding a bit closer, prompting Q to try opening his eyes.  His head was hanging over the back of the inadequate chair he was sitting in, and his neck ached with just the thought of lifting the weight of his skull, so even when the boffin pried his eyelids open, he was just staring at the ceiling.  Nondescript white.  “But then your James got to Mumsy before I could come and find her.”  Silva sounded irked enough that Q tensed, expecting to be on the receiving end of that temper, but then his kidnapper’s tone changed suddenly to tease, “But I suppose I should be putting emphasis on _your_ James, shouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know what you’re insinuating,” Q croaked out.  He grimaced and forced himself to move, muscles cramping all over as he completed the simple act of lifting his head so that he could finally take in the room, and the man sitting in a chair not far from him.  The rest of the room was about as unremarkable as the ceiling, but the man in the cream-and-white suit across from him was anything but: his hair smoothed back immaculately and his smile containing a poisonous, snake-like kind of charm that had Q’s stomach turning.  There was entirely too much knowing in those almond-shaped, jovially narrowed eyes.  

“Come now, Q, you really are a clever boy,” Silva pressed, leaning forward over his knees, “Figure it out.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.  I don’t know what you want,” Q maintained.  

“Stop playing stupid with me.  It’s not a flattering look on you.”

Q’s head still felt thick from his rude awakening - a condition probably exacerbated by whatever drug they’d knocked him out with - but he was recovering rapidly enough to school his features into something unreadable, something ignorant, “Flattering or not, I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about.”

For a long, unsettling moment, Silva just watched him, eyes moving in little flicks and slides like they were knives, paring away Q’s skin slowly.  The scary truth was, Q had a sinking sensation that he did know what was going on, because the use of his old name seemed intentional.  It had him scared in a way that was so visceral and deep, he could barely comprehend it.  The feeling was like what he imagined a brain aneurism would feel like: a ticking time-bomb in one’s head, impossible to comprehend until the time came for it to burst open and destroy everything in one sweep.  

“You really are a marvel,” Silva murmured eventually, actually sounding awed, which caught the Quartermaster off guard.  Sitting back, testing his bindings and finding them secure (a loop each holding his ankles to the forward chairlegs, and a simple loop of rope from each wrist going under the seat ensuring that he couldn’t lift his hands up), Q tensed and waited until Silva went on with a shrug, “If I didn’t have evidence to the contrary, I don’t know if I’d be able to tell that you were spouting anything but the truth.  I wonder if anyone _in this lifetime_ knows that you’re such a good liar?”

Shit.  Q’s world cracked beneath his feet, solid ground suddenly nothing but an illusion.  It took all of his skill and focus to keep his eyes from widening in shock, even as realization began to settle in like an iron weight across his shoulders.  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied, but the words sounded distant and tinny in his hears.  

“Fine then - you listen, I’ll talk,” Silva complied with too much grace and a too-knowing smile, and Q felt more of the foundation beneath him crumble away.  He didn’t know what was beneath that, but he sensed a yawning abyss that he wouldn’t be crawling out of, not in this lifetime.  Q wanted to crawl away inside of himself, but instead he was stuck where he was, listening as Silva smiled and got increasingly chatty, “It all started with my great grandfather telling me stories as a child.  Those are some of my fondest memories, really, although everyone else in my family claimed that he was quite mad - couldn’t stand him, actually.  But while the rest of my family left him to molder away in an old folks’ home, I visited him, and he spoke of when his family moved to Ireland.”

Q’s stomach clenched, the memory of the old gunshot wound flaring up.  He bit the inside of his cheek to hide any further reaction.

“His father became quite rich there, albeit by rather underhanded means,” Silva went on coyly, still watching Q with enough intensity to burn, “and when he died, he left… let’s call it his legacy… to his son, my great grandfather.  You should know him, actually.”

“How the in the world would I know him?”

“Why, because you were responsible for taking it all away from him.  In another lifetime, of course.”

It felt like being punched in the gut, the impact of the invisible blow somehow going deeper, threatening to knock Q’s spirit right out the back of his spine.  He’d withstood a lot of things in his past: crippling fear, horrific confusion over his own condition, even physical pain on too many occasions to count, but nothing like this.  No one had ever _guessed_.  Q, in his more naive lives, had told people, obviously, but they’d all believed him insane and either ignored him or put him away somewhere.  

No, that wasn’t true.  

People had figured out Q’s secret on their own before.  Just once.  And Q had ended up burned alive for it, the memory utterly undimmed by the centuries that had passed in between, and suddenly now Q could taste his own ashes in his mouth again.

“This is insane,” Q snapped back, his survival instincts finally snapping into place and clearing his head.  He made his voice incredulous, almost offended, sharpening his posture and tone like a weapon.  “What are you talking about - ‘in another lifetime’?  Can you even _hear_ yourself?  Look, if we’re talking about karma, and my great-great-relative hurt your-”

Silva’s voice rose to a roar and he stood up so fast he toppled his own chair.  “This isn’t-!”   Just as he took a threatening step towards Q - making the Quartermaster brace himself and glare defiantly - all of the heat and fury seemed to fly out of the larger man.  Like a tide turning, as changeable as mercury, Silva was calm and smiling again, and Q realized he liked it better when the man was enraged.  “I see we aren’t going to get anywhere this way,” Silva said, tutting softly before turning to the room’s only other piece of furniture, a table that Q had only noticed peripherally.  It had a case on it, and a few other things that Q couldn’t quite turn his head enough to make out.  “A pity.  I was looking forward to just having a normal, civil conversation like two sensible grown men.”

“And what are we going to have now instead?” Q had to ask, voice a lot softer than before.  He craned his neck to keep an eye on Silva, even as all he could see was the man’s broad back as he bent over something on the table.  

When Silva turned again, he had a needle in hand, freshly drawn up and gleaming a dull gold.  “Instead, I’m going to give you something that will loosen your tongue a bit, and we’re going to talk a lot more like interrogator to prisoner,” Silva said blithely, “Have you ever heard of Russia’s SP-117?  This is less elegant but decidedly more effective, and without the pesky side-effect of you waking up with no memory of having told me everything.”

Q’s heart had started rabbiting in his chest, quickly reaching a pace it hadn’t beaten at since he’d gotten on that bloody helicopter to go rescue 007.  Since he’d last seen James’s face for the first time.  Since he’d seen his mother at the door with an apologetic, pained look on her face, right before men came in a dragged Q away to an insane asylum, _for his own good,_ of course.  He felt a panic attack rising like clawing hands up his throat, and was leaning away from Silva and protesting, “No!  You’re insane - no-!” even before Silva began striding towards him.  

Talking above Q’s protests, Silva chided, “Now now, none of that,” and reached out with his free hand, tangling it deep in Q’s hair.  Q still struggled, growing wild, growing desperate, but the grip on his hair twisted his head to one side before holding it still, leaving Q’s neck vulnerable and open for the needle to bite into seconds later.  Q felt the scream crawl up his throat even before he registered the pain, because he could all but feel the last of the stability falling out from underneath his feet, and he knew what was under it now: pitch and kerosene and kindling.  He was coming full circle, and could sense the pyre rushing up to find him again, because Q had learned that his secrets were like matches, and the only way to keep them from burning him alive was to make sure they never got any oxygen.  

Silva stepped back and released Q as the drug swept into the dark-haired young man’s system, breaking open the locks and giving those secrets a breath of devastating fresh air.  

“I’ve not used this drug much before, although the results have always been quite fast,” Silva spoke amicably as Q shivered and shook, as if he’d just been shot up with lava, even though his body felt fine and his veins weren’t afire.  He was just scared out of his mind instead, and staring through his glasses at nothing, wondering if this was somehow an omen, a sign to say, ‘ _You’ve finally messed up enough that this is your last life - because the first burning’s free, but the second will cost you_.’  There had been more days than Q could count when he would have gladly greeted the herald of the end with a hug, ready to escape the endless cycle, but right now he just wanted to run away and hide somewhere safe.  As he felt the drug taking hold, he imagined his skin being slowly peeled away and pinned back, and he released a frustrated cry again like a young rabbit in a snare, because he didn’t want to know what Silva would find beneath his flesh and bones: would it be cyanide and gold or would it be worms and mold?

~^~

Q’s hand twitched, aching for a pen, but the rope was cutting off circulation and making his fingers tingle.  Finding nothing to grip and write with, he moved his lips soundlessly, numb as his fingers: “Maybe it was that first fire that did it…  Maybe no one ever kills witches… maybe they _make_ witches like me out of the innocents they burn.”

~^~

A sort of listless weightlessness had settled on Q, precluding panic, or at least making all of his emotions as slippery as eels - they slid into his mind as easily and quickly as they slid out, no matter how he grabbed at them, so he quickly stopped trying.  His body felt a bit like it was floating and made of lead all at once, and he idly wondered how one drug could do all that, even as his eyes sluggishly tracked Silva as the man paced before him.  

“Are you ready to have a decent chat with me now?” Silva asked, all smiles.

“I don’t see how anyone has a decent chat with anyone else while one party is kidnapped and restrained,” Q replied, and some distant part of him was impressed and disturbed by how the words poured off his tongue like droplets of quicksilver: bright and clean and quick as fishes.  

Silva must have noticed the increased alacrity of the words, because he stopped walking and just watched Q with increased interest - and perhaps avarice.  “Well, we’ll just have to make do then, yes?”

“Yes,” the word fell out, this one less like quicksilver and more like a drop of blood from a slit wrist.  Q knew that death; knew how it was impossible to hold the blood in, how it just continued to escape once you’d shown it the door.  Q was starting to feel the same detached, resigned fascination that he’d felt at the end of that lifetime, too, helpless to stop what had already begun.  

Silva pulled his chair closer to Q, and the weightless-mountain-heavy-feel made it too much effort for Q to flinch back, or even blink, as the madman sat down close enough to put a hand upon the Quartermaster’s knee.  It was like Q’s body wasn’t even his; a strange thought, considering the fact that Q had literally switched bodies dozens of times now.  Were any of the bodies really his?  Or had his true body been left as a crispy husk long, long ago?  “Why are you doing this?” Q found himself asking softly, hollowly, looking into that mercilessly hungry face.

“Because I’m a curious man, Q - or do you prefer another name?”  Silva went on before Q’s loosened lips could form a response, “I also have a very natural love of money, and I am fairly certain that the fortune you stole from my great-grandfather has never turned up again.  But that’s just a minor reward.  The real prize is _you_ , Q.”  Silva’s big hand kneaded Q’s thigh, his posture turning encouraging, and for a dizzy second Q found himself caught up in the excitement - but then the emotion slipped mercilessly away, leaving Q disoriented and sick-feeling instead.  

“What use am I to you, really?” he asked, unable to hide his bewilderment - unable to hide pretty much anything, with the drug rolling through him.  “You haven’t even asked me about MI6.  And you could get money elsewhere.”

“Ah, but revenge is a different currency.”  Silva’s grip got tight enough to bruise, but Q was so numb that it took him a beat to register the pain for what it was, and then wince.  “So, I need to hear you say it: was it you, Q, who ruined my great-grandfather?  Is it you-”  Silva pulled something from his pocket, stood it up before Q’s eyes for him to see.  “-In this picture?”

It was an old photograph, back when the technology was still young; age had treated the picture poorly, draining the colors, singing the edges so that half of the picture simply didn’t exist anymore.  What remained was barely enough to tuck into a wallet.  Still, Q recognized his own face looking out at him, his hairstyle and clothing different, but otherwise indistinguishable from who he was now.  Q knew from experience that the resemblance was more than uncanny, but no one else had ever known where to look before, to compare Q to his far-flung past selves.  

Q was also pretty sure that the man on his left had to be Silva’s great-grandfather, because this picture had been taken shortly before he’d betrayed the man’s trust and made him pay for all the evil that he’d done.  James in all of his pasts had a nose for trouble, but he often had a stubborn moral compass, too, and Q was even worse in that department.  He’d known the danger of taking on a mobster, but had been determined to do it anyway.  He and James had paid for it, too, but not before they’d done the damage they’d come to do.

To Q’s left, where the picture was destroyed except a pair of nicely-clad legs and a hand hanging near Q’s, had stood Jameson Savage.  

“Yes,” Q realized that he was answering even while his eyes found themselves swimming in and out of focus, recreating the rest of the picture, imagining James… Jameson… the only other soul to keep him company in this endless trek.  

Rough fingers gripped Q’s chin, but instead of forcing his gaze away, they loosened and dropped a moment later.  Silva’s finger tapped the damaged edges of the photo, where Q’s eyes were dazedly fixed.  “This is James, isn’t it?  He reincarnates, too, doesn’t he?”

“Yes.”  It seemed to be all that Q could say, the admissions falling like rain, soft and unstoppable.  “But he never remembers.  Not like I do.”

“Do you know how I knew that?”

Q didn’t want to know the look on Silva’s face, but the drug continued to make him pliant, and he found his gaze sliding past the photograph to the smug grin beyond.  “How?”

“After I saw the resemblance between this photo and the new Quartermaster of MI6, I did some digging,” Silva was more than pleased to explain his genius, “And no one digs like I can - before she left me for dead, M trained me well, you know.  And do you know what I dug up?”

“No.”

“Some very interesting diaries, dating back over a hundred years - and written in multiple languages.”  Silva shook his head as if incredibly impressed, and all Q could do was sag back in his chair, feeling like a puppet without any strings to cling to.  He was aware that he was breathing almost too slowly.  “And you know, the most fascinating part was… my analyst says that all of it is the same handwriting.  Even though the carbon dating on the paper and ink confirm that those letters span far more than just one lifetime by far.  So tell me, Q…”  Silva leaned forward, tucking the photograph away and gripping Q’s jaw once more, as if Q had the faintest ability to pull away, bound and drugged as he was.  “...Are you one in a long line of eccentric forgers, or do you somehow have the gift of reincarnation spoken of in those pages?”

Q tried to hold the secret in, but it was like trying to bite an enemy with a broken jaw; he couldn’t grip a thing, couldn’t bear down, couldn’t do anything but whine softly in a deep and unspoken pain.  “Every time I die, I come back.  And I remember everything from before, as if it were just another chapter.”

“Marvelous,” Silva breathed like a dragon exhaling sulfurous smoke.  Q sat with his jaw cradled in Silva’s palm, and felt something hot and wet slip down his cheek, fast and startling like a shooting star.  A blink, and a similar pearl of wetness was released from his other eye, and he tried to grasp precisely why he was crying even as his brain twisted and stumbled.  He felt dazed.  Drunk.  And yet clear in a way that said he’d remember all of this later, which was worse than any of those body-damaging drugs he’d ever taken - at least those had repaid him with a lovely chunk of no remembrance.  Until James had come along, in one form or another, and told Q not to hurt himself that way…

Two more trails of heat slid down Q’s cheeks, just wetting the corners of his lips as they moved without his permission, “It’s not really a gift.  We’re not built to remember death, I think.  There’s a reason it’s the last thing we experience, and then we experience no more.”

“But you _do_ \- you experience more,” Silva pressed, utterly undeterred.  If anything, his eyes were growing more and more interested.  

“Yes.”  Q couldn’t keep a secret to save his life right now, an ironic thought, giving his condition.  “But I still haven’t figured out what to do with over a dozen memories of dying.  It’s not exactly as though I could just go to a therapist about it, not without being committed.”

Silva’s smile took on a wicked gleam.  “Which you have been.”

Q’s body shuddered.  He didn’t want to relive this, couldn’t stop it.  “Yes,” he said in a weak rasp of breath even as he tried to weakly twist his head out of Silva’s grip.  His body still didn’t want to listen, however, any more than his mouth and voice-box did.  “People don’t like things that are different than they are.  They lash out.  Or they hide it away somewhere sterile and dark.”  The walls had been unrelentingly white, but the place itself may as well have been a hell without sun.  Q had _believed_ he was crazy by the end.  

“I’m not like others, Q,” Silva pressed, sounding almost agonizingly sincere, but also oily like petrol, “What you are… it’s amazing.  Precious.”

“That’s not what you mean,” Q said, because Silva had given him a truth serum, so truth was what he was going to get, “You mean _valuable_ , not precious.  Something to covet and use.  But you can’t use this.  I can’t teach it to you.”

“Have you ever tried?”

“No,” was the truth that once again game out, followed by the mass exodus of words that felt like it would never stop, “But even if I did try to understand this condition that I have, it wouldn’t be to spread it like a disease - it would be in the hopes of finding a way to stop it.”  Q felt his emotions threaten to boil over but then recede as quickly as they had arisen, a shift in feelings so completely beyond his control that it made a second wave go through him, this one filled with terrible vulnerability and fear.  Q controlled some things in his life rigidly, to make up for the fact that he could not control this reincarnation business at all, but now he was like someone falling down a lightless hole, grabbing for handholds but finding nothing to even control his descent.

“That’s awfully shortsighted of you, Q,” Silva rebuked, his own expression showing only what he wanted to show: a fine balance of impatience and encouragement, “and selfish.  Just because you haven’t appreciated your long string of lives doesn’t mean that others wouldn’t.”

“I told you, I don’t know how it works.  It doesn’t matter if I’m selfish or not, because I don’t have anything to tell you.”

Silva didn’t seem to believe him, which was infuriating, because Silva was the one who’d drugged him with truth serum, for heaven’s sakes.  But apparently avarice was blind.  “Come now, Q dear, I’m in a position to offer you virtually anything you want.  You just have to cooperate.  I won’t even ask about your precious MI6.”

“You don’t even know what I want.  I just want this to end,” Q found himself saying numbly, so devastatingly truthful.  His body was feeling more heavy than light, his feet slipping on a precipice, and Silva wasn’t about to keep him from falling.

Misinterpreting, Silva reached forward, wrapping a hand around one of Q’s bound wrists and soothing, “And it will, just as soon as you tell me what I want to know.   _Quid pro quo_ : you help me, I help you.  It sounds fair, doesn’t it?”

“ 'Fair' is a human construct that I haven’t been a part of in a very long time.”

“Such a martyr,” Silva snorted, derisively now, sitting back.  “Of course, usually martyrs care more for the greater good, but I’m finding that hard to believe, considering you won’t even help one man achieve what is, really, immortality.  You could _help_ people, Q - and not just me.”  Now Silva was trying a different tactic, and even with his brain scrambled and his inhibitions turned off, Q could tell that.  The man’s voice became more gentle and cajoling, his body language projecting openness that Q was already becoming familiar with as being part of a 00-agent’s training.  “I understand your dislike for me.  And that’s all right.”  Silva’s smile had too many teeth, stretched too wide; Q felt in imminent danger of being swallowed whole.  “But what you can do could herald the dawning of a new era, with a bit of study.”

Q couldn’t help it - possibly couldn’t have helped it even if he wasn’t drugged to the gills.  He burst out laughing, and it was just about the most horrible sound he’d ever heard himself make, at least in this lifetime.  He felt the cracked edges of too much sanity sharpening the noise like glass broken at an acute angle.  “Help humanity?  Help _you_?” he somehow managed to get past the cracked giggles, barely aware of Silva’s startled look before continuing with bitterness so thick that he was sure he’d choke on it, “I’ve watched more people come and go than you have probably known in this entire, finite, pathetic lifetime of yours - and you know, that causes the damnedest thing.”  Q felt his mouth stretch into a grin that was probably disturbingly like Silva’s: too wide and too toothy, even as he felt new tears balance hotly behind his lashes.  “I can barely _connect_ to normal people anymore!” he finally shrieked after a moment of silence, and was shocked by the depths of his own fury - another wave of emotions he wasn’t prepared to handle, full of anger and hurt and most of all a childlike sort of helplessness, a confusion over his own inadequacies.  Or perhaps it was less confusion and more realization: realization of just how broken he was, in technicolor.  “I’m almost a functional psychopath, except where James is concerned,” he found his traitor mouth continuing, spilling his thoughts as they came to them, thoughts that he’d had for a long time but had never had the courage to even whisper to himself - or write down in his journals.  “So you’ll pardon me if I can barely look at you without looking through you, because you’re barely even three-dimensional to me,” his voice had become a seething hiss at the end, like acid on flesh, something that Silva should sympathize with.

While Q’s emotions faded away into nothing but an immense sadness, Silva’s expression contorted with ugly rage, and the Quartermaster couldn’t bring himself to care.  As dictated by the serum in his veins, he’d only told the truth, and he knew there was no way that he’d convince Silva that this truth was hurting Q most of all.  As Silva’s breathing picked up and his face mottled and his fists tightened, Q just sagged back in his chair and felt the tears escape, joining the others that had gone before, and wondering if he could think as he did and even truly be human anymore.  He tried - he really did - to connect with people, but he was always so aware that they’d never exist outside of this lifetime that it was _hard_.  But damn, did he try, because he thought that James would want him to.  What kind of person had to work that hard to care about other people?  A monster.  The answer was easy and sickening all at once, like swallowing an egg yolk.  

“You do realize, Q,” Silva said with deadly softness, getting himself under control with visible effort, while Q just watched dispassionately, emotions like dying embers sending smoke through his chest, “that there are less pleasant ways for me to get what I want.  If you truly don’t know anything-”

“I don’t.”

“-Then I have connections in the scientific world who would dearly love to have a crack at you,” Silva finished in a snarl, hand shooting out snake-fast to wrap around Q’s neck, dragging him forward by his throat until they were nose to nose.  Silva breathed across his nose and mouth, “You’d be surprised how many men there are, who would describe themselves as you just described yourself: unable to care about others as if they were real people.”  Q struggled, but  Silva’s grip tightened down like a wolf’s jaws around his throat until Q coughed and whimpered, feeling his air getting cut off.  “But, like you, they’re geniuses in their own ways.  I actually think you’ll get along quite handsomely, at least until they start digging around to find what makes you tick.”  

“No… stop,” Q gasped, feeling another wave of emotions incoming: utter panic and bone cracking fear.  This was one of his nightmares - one of many, to be truthful, but one that hadn’t come true yet.  In all of Q’s trials and tribulations, he’d been lucky in a twisted way, in that no one had ever believed him until now, and therefore no one had ever considered experimenting on him.  It was a ridiculous thought, after all, to waste time and effort on a man who apparently recalled all of his past lifetimes.  But for Silva, it seemed like a worthwhile endeavor, and even before Silva began describing it, Q could imagine it.  

“I wonder if your intellect will survive.  It will be a pity, really, if it doesn’t, but I imagine that the first thing that anyone will want to look at will be your brain.  Surely the answers lie there.”

“Stop it,” Q choked past Silva’s hand, eyes squeezing shut, “I can’t give you what you want!”

“Precisely.  So I’m going to _take_ what I want from you.”

“You don’t want this.  You _don’t want what I have_.”  Q twisted his voice up unto a growl with what little air Silva was letting him get.  

Then Silva said something that washed all the fear away, replaced it all with a supernova of fury that slashed, burned, and salted the earth behind it.  “Fine then - maybe James does.  He’s quite like you, isn’t he?  Your journals seem to indicate that he’s a pale copy of you, at least, but I’m sure two test subjects will yield better results than one.”

Q jerked his head back, not even feeling the bruising pressure of squeezing fingers slide across his jugular and windpipe as he got loose.  His loosened tongue now felt afire, and for all that Q had never been a large man, he felt like a very real monster indeed was rising up, huge and hoary-furred, inside of him.  “You will not touch him,” the beast in Q’s throat growled while Q’s slim body shook.

“Oh, have I struck a nerve-?” Silva started to say, sensing blood.

But Q cut him off and went for the throat himself, “If you go after James, I swear that I’ll kill you.”  And he meant it; of course he meant it, he couldn’t lie right now, could he?  But this was the strongest truth he’d ever uttered, and it scorched and burned his morals to ash on the way up.  Q, the Quartermaster of MI6, was a bit squeamish about killing unless viewed through the safe distance of a computer screen; Q, the soul that had been dragged away from a peaceful death time and time again with only one other soul for company, knew that he’d do anything to protect that one companion.  Maybe this was how soulmates worked: maybe everyone had a soul they journeyed with through time, but Q was the broken one, his eidetic memory shattering the careful wall between lives and making him incapable of bonding correctly.  And maybe it made his love grow like a cancer, until it was this monstrous thing willing to turn Silva inside out with his bare hands if it meant keeping Bond - his soulmate - safe.    

Glad that that last thought didn’t fall out of his mouth at least, Q strained against the cords at his wrists and ankles even as Silva quickly sublimated his shock at Q’s threats.  “So, the mouse has teeth,” the larger man hummed appreciatively, “I should have known, after reading your journals.  You were never the one to instigate the violence - that was James’s job - but you were more than capable of finishing it.”  Silva cocked his head, mouth twitching upwards at the corners as if attached to strings.  “I’m starting to see your more vicious side now.  It was hard to imagine some of the stories in the journal, looking at the boffin I see before me now.”

“I’m not vicious,” Q said, but he felt some of his anger totter, fall, crack.  He felt dizzy.

“Either the serum isn’t quite working, or you actually believe that,” replied Silva with enough patronizing sadness to make Q want to scream again.  Q’s kidnapper reached out a hand and petted Q’s head before going on, “Just accept it, Q, we’re all rats on the inside.  We can be as loyal as we like when life is good, but throw us in a pit together with no way out, and we’ll devour each other as quickly as biscuits.” The delight with which Silva said this last part was sickening, and Q tried not to believe his words, even as he remembered times… so many times… when he’d pushed aside morals…

“I only ever did those things because I had to,” he found himself protesting weakly, the dizziness in his head spreading to a nausea that wouldn’t leave.

“You mean-” Silva guessed, standing.  He loomed over Q and smiled like a benevolent god.  “-That you only acted the villain to save James.  Or to help him out.  Or was it just to please him?  Really, Q, those aren’t morals, those are excuses.  But then again…”  This time when Silva paused, Q felt as though it was the mythical sword of Damocles hanging over him, and the last thread holding it aloft was snapped as Silva purred, “...That’s what we call love, isn’t it?”

Q didn’t even know what he responded with; he was pretty sure that it wasn't in English.  It might not have even been a language the world had anymore - he certainly had lived through a dead language or two.  All he knew was that the cry he loosed was full of pain and outrage, as Silva tread upon the soft portions of his heart.  Q actually came very close to tipping his chair over as he lunged forward, but not only could he not stop the pain, he couldn’t even manage to adequately topple over.  Silva laughed, wild and gleeful, a coyote’s cackle.  

“You’re just too precious, Q - I never dreamed that everything I read about in those old diaries could be real,” Silva chuckled as he walked away, back to the table, reaching for something else.  “I also never imagined that you’d be this much fun, because I really have been enjoying this talk.”  Silva had now in his hand, Q realized, a mobile.  It’s screen indicated that it was on, but Q didn’t have a very good view until Silva turned it, showing a screen that indicated a phone-call in progress, but the speaker on this end muted.  Q’s brain felt like it was coming to some precipice of knowledge as he started at the screen, seeing the number, and he felt understanding dawn even as Silva smiled his poisonous smile and said, “I wonder if James enjoyed this oh-so-enlightening talk as well?” and pushed the ‘unmute’ button.  

Immediately, James’s voice roared through, as he became more than just a passive listener: “-You fucking _bastard_!  I should have put a hole through your head while I had the chance-!”

James’s ranting continued, with all the blistering fire of a kiln - it was all directed at Silva, it was clear, an impotent fury directed towards a cunning enemy out of reach, but that didn’t matter to Q.  What mattered was that he’d spilled all of his secrets, and because he’d had the number of James’s burner on his laptop, Silva had rung James up to hear the entire, gut-spilling discussion.  Q hung his head over his lap and finally, violently vomited, feeling the final nail to his coffin being spiked in.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was at this point in my writing that I thought to myself: 'Huh... Can I actually fix all the things that I broke?' *shrugs and just keeps writing angst anyway* *makes train-wreck noises*
> 
> It was also at this point that I realized I was writing a broken-soulmates AU...


	4. Bleeding-heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q's secrets are out, and now Bond enters the conversation. Generally speaking, people don't like having their world-views shattered - and 00-agents in particular aren't known for being happy when you keep secrets from them. So the question is: how will 007 take it when he learns everything at long last?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick chapter warning for more suicidal ideation - and for Silva realizing what it means to deal with basically an immortal who cares for literally just one person in the entire world, past and present.

James and Silva talked for awhile.  Well, Silva talked; Bond roared invectives and some truly impressive, creative threats.  Q shook like someone going into shock and just listened, head still hanging, bile on his chin and on the floor between his feet.  He was breathing too slowly again, aware of each laborious inhale and exhale as a rush in his ears even as his heart raced painfully against its moorings in his chest.  “I fucked up,” he heard himself saying, numb again but still drugged.  

“Now, now, Q, don’t be so hard on yourself,” Silva soothed as Bond’s angry yelling broke off, “It was inevitable that someone find out.”

“No, it wasn’t.”  Q shook his head, starting at the floor with its splatter of vomit and trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong.  What he’d done to deserve this.  All of this.  “I’ve kept myself hidden for decades.  Centuries.”

“Not even your dear James found out?” Silva pressed.  James snarled something, but was ignored; Silva took him off speakerphone again.  

The words kept pouring out of Q like he was exsanguinating.  “He can’t find out.  He doesn’t remember.  He doesn’t know.”  Q’s voice sounded hollow and small in his ears, but they were the simplest truths he knew.  “I would have pushed him away if I tried to convince him.  I’d sound insane.”

“Well, Bond,” Silva spoke back into the mobile, “your Q is quite a bleeding-heart, wouldn’t you say?”  Bond was no longer on speakerphone; Q couldn’t hear him except for a tinny, angry buzz.  

And suddenly the rage was back.  This time Q threw himself against his restraints so hard that he felt something in his left hand and wrist dislocate.  At the same time, however, that same hand slipped loose of the ropes in a scrape of skin on hemp, and Q actually tipped the chair over.  He had one hand to catch himself on, and the pain of landing on dislocated joints should have shut Q right up - but none of it could get past his wrath.  “ ** _You leave him alone_**!” he was roaring instead.  He was a forest-fire on the inside; it didn’t matter that he’d immolate himself in the burning, because these fires were his, and he’d turn them on anyone who threatened Bond.  Threatened James.  Threatened the one constant in his long and meaningless life.  Q switched languages without thinking, English not brutal enough, spitting verbal fire in an ancient Celtic tongue instead.  Bond had taught him half the swear-words, as they’d sat around the fire, Q just a child but feeling so lucky to have found his friend so quickly in this life…

The anger shattered and the pain came rushing in to take its place; Q screamed, wild and hurt and animal.  His wrist felt like someone had put hot coals into it, pain streaking all the way up to his shoulder.  He was distantly aware of Silva coming over and dragging him and his chair upright again, which brought the phone closer, so that Q could hear Bond yelling again even if he couldn’t parse out the words.  

“I’m sorry, James,” Q found himself saying in dazed response to that angry tone, tears streaking his cheeks again, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. _Syngnōmēn ékhe_.”  

“As you can hear, James, you’ve got yourself a far more interesting Quartermaster than you ever dreamed of,” Silva put the mobile back on speakerphone, setting it on the floor nearby as he crouched and caught Q’s wrists to tie them up again.  Q fought, but weakly, because it felt like his body was either in pain or rebelling against him.  

“You’re insane,” Bond’s voice spat out of the phone like a blast of gunfire, so full of anger that Q flinched, “You’ve got him so out of his head he’ll say anything.”

“Weren’t you listening, James?  There’s more to this than one immortal’s confession.”  Silva finished retying Q’s wrists again and then roughly patted Q’s head.  The dark-haired man swayed, but couldn’t escape the touch.  His left wrist was still on fire, but now it had ropes biting into it again; he could all but feel it swelling.  “I’ve found more pictures of him since, you know?  With those diaries, I have proof that even the most logical minds would pause and take notice of, and I’ve got images of your Q in half a dozen different lives already - now that I know where to look.  You, too, by the way.”

“Stop,” Q pleaded.

Silva didn’t.  Silva only got worse, like a disease gaining influence on a body once the immune system was crushed.  “He quite loves you, you know, James.  It’s ridiculous.”

“Stop!”  The plea got louder, more desperate.  

“Do you know, I think he’s killed more people for you before than you’ve killed for Queen and C-”

“Fucking _stop it_!  You’re ruining everything!”  Q didn’t even know where the words were coming from as they shrieked out of him, ripping his throat to shreds, it felt like.  There were tears in there and sobs, too, adding salt to the wounds.  

“Come now, Q - I’m only telling James.  He’s the same as you.”

“No, he’s not.  He’s close - he’s _almost_.  He’s better.  He’s not fucked up like I am, a mistake.”  The words had to push their way past crying now.  He wanted out of here.  He wanted James.  And he wanted to crawl in a hole so deep that James would never find him in a thousand lifetimes.  

“Q-”  This time it was James’s voice, sounding wrecked and distorted through the speaker.  

“ ** _No_**!” Q cut him off hysterically, “Even when I tell just you, things go wrong!  That’s what I learned when I was committed - when I was ostracized - when I was burnt at the _fucking stake_!”

Even Silva fell silent at that one, the shock enough to render everyone quiet while Q gasped for breath and panted, something about his heartrate and his lungs still not syncing.  It made him feel weak and lightheaded, and he for a moment couldn’t remember how to open his eyes.  He wanted to vomit again, because maybe that would make it better... although it hadn’t worked that way so far.  Now he just had the taste of bile all over his mouth, and the world was still hell inside and out.  

Reeling, Q felt detached from his own body, like a fly on the wall listening in as Silva belatedly started talking again.  It seemed that no one knew how to respond to Q’s last outburst, so the topic shifted.  “What do you say, James?  You’ve got the whole truth now - your little boffin is quite a lot more than he seems,” Silva cajoled, and Q resisted the urge to sob.  He didn’t feel like more.  Silva thought that adding years to Q’s memory - lifetimes to his past - had added value to him like gilt upon bronze, but to Q, it felt like each day was scraping away more and more of him.  He wasn’t the metaphorical golden goose - he was barely anything at all.  But Silva kept going, tone growing more animated, “Imagine it, James!  You know that you’re the best at what you do, don’t be shy about it, and before you there was me.”  Bond was once again off speakerphone, but Q could still hear him growl something that sounded angry.  Q tried to figure out where Silva going with this, but his brain was too bogged down.  His head ached.  His bones burned.  He was Pompeii on the inside, and the lava was hardening to fetters around his thoughts and joints.  “MI6 is going to inevitably betray you,” Silva pointed out, and once again the tone of Bond’s voice returned sharply.  “But think about this - you can get out alive, if you jump ship before they make you walk the plank,” Silva’s tone turned sly, and Q began to get an inkling at what Silva driving at, just before his kidnapper went on, “What do you say, James?  What would you rather have?  An organization where you’re just a cog in the machine, inevitably disposable - or with us?”

At some point Silva had walked over to Q again, and now had a proprietary hand on Q’s head.  It didn’t feel worth it to shake it off, although Q whined audibly when Silva’s fingers went from idly resting to tightly clenching, curling in soft dark strands too sharply.  

“The three of us could hold the whole world hostage,” went on the web Silva was weaving, each sticky strand hung with drops of gold, baited hooks.  “We each have our skills, skills no one else has.  Isn’t that right, Q?”  Silva gave Q’s head a shake, sending bright sparks of pain through his scalp.  “You’re far smarter than everyone thinks you are, aren’t you?  Tell me - what does a man who’s lived scores of lives remember?”

“Everything,” Q gave up the information helplessly, closing his eyes and choking on the truth as it bubbled up like sewage in his lungs.  This time, he couldn’t help but hiccup on the soft sob, “I remember everything.  My memory is eidetic.”

Silva’s laughter was full of manic delight, and he let Q go.  The bespectacled young man’s head sagged down towards his knees, and he dry heaved a little, all of him feeling wretched.  It made it so much worse to have Silva rejoicing in Q’s answers, because it showed just how little he understood - Silva saw so many opportunities and gifts where Q knew there to be only curses.  

“Just imagine it, James!” Silva was crowing now, pacing the room and gesticulating with the hand not holding the phone to his ear, “We’re MI6’s brightest jewels, you and I, and we understand the rat-race like no one else.   _No one else_.  We could finally be free of it, though, to shake this world to its foundations - and behind us, we’d have your little friend here, who holds whole lifetimes of knowledge for us to use.”  Silva’s voice dropped suddenly to a low, intimate murmur, “And he’d never betray you.”

Perhaps Silva understood some things after all.  

“You’d have a Quartermaster every spy dreams of having, and naturally, I’d lead with an understanding of what it means to be an agent-” Silva finished, pacing now at Q’s back like an avalanche that Q could already see himself buried by.  

Further words from Silva were cut off by an explosive repercussion at the door - a lock being blown or shot off.  Q’s emotions were too tangled up to properly summon surprise, but he sensed Silva swinging around and freezing behind him as none other than James Bond himself stepped through the door, gun raised and already looking for a target.  The man’s blue eyes were like chips of colored steel, and he radiated a kind of hard fury that made Q’s breath stop in his chest.  The drug in his system warped and tangled his feelings until he didn’t know whether he was awed by the sight or terrified, the two reactions warring like fire and water in his chest.  

Calm and low, steady as an anvil, James replied with no need for the phone peeking out of his shirt-pocket, “I’ve already got a Quartermaster like that, and M might not be the best boss, but at least she doesn’t monologue.”  James fired.

And missed.  Q suspected that the only reason for the miss, however, was the fact that there was someone in the way - Q.  Silva was taking advantage of the human shield and had immediately ducked down.  At about the same time Bond’s Walther went off, Q felt Silva grab his throat from behind.  He flinched at the hot air of the man’s breath against his ear as Silva snarled out, “Why, James, how nice of you to join us, but how rude of you to arrive so unfashionably early.  I wasn’t expecting you yet.”  His voice sounded demonic, wild, from this close.  

James didn’t look bothered by his miss.  His gun was still raised, held competently in both hands, and his expression remained flat and controlled.  Q was suddenly, unutterably proud of him.  James didn’t remember anything from his past lives like Q did, but sometimes his body did - it made him physically competent in a way that many people could train years for and never attain.  That was why it was also so rewarding to just watch James move, because Q could see ‘old Jameses’ even now, in the graceful power of his shoulders, the natural balancing of his weight upon sure feet.  Every movement was aiming James’s gun dangerously close to Q’s head, but Q didn’t mind.  Everything felt like it was over anyway, over in a way that it never had been before.  He found himself smiling, a crooked stretching of his lips that for some reason triggered a wetness in his eyes.  

“Do it, James,” he said, whispered.  He knew James could hear him; knew it by the faintest jump of a muscle in the blue-eyed man’s cheek.  He could also see the resistance to the order in the subtle narrowing of those glacial blue eyes, so Q went on, more gently, like someone coaxing a creature out of hiding, “It’s all right.  Shoot.”  There was a hole in Q’s chest that no one could see, an imaginary wound that nonetheless felt real to him, and it was yawning wider, wider, wider - a black hole that he just wanted to sink into for good.  If James put a real hole in its place, he wasn’t sure that it would be a bad thing.  It hurt to hang on the precipice like this, and he’d been holding on by his fingertips for so long…  “Please, James.  It won’t hurt you.”  A ragged pain speared across Q’s chest, but he finished anyway, saying with a melancholy sadness, “You won’t remember anyway.”  Q wondered if James would, or if somehow, this would be his last life.  He’d died so many times, but he’d never been killed by James before.  Maybe that was the secret.  Maybe they together were an Ouroboros, and only by the snake devouring itself completely could the cycle be broken.  

Silva wasn’t deaf, and was close enough to hear Q, too, and not appreciate what he was hearing.  “Shut up!” the man bellowed, some of his madness showing through.  Q found it hard to be much scared by it; Q had the monopoly on madness, he figured.  Something hard and cold pressed behind his ear, and he instantly recognized the barrel of a second gun.  

A chuckle with a nasty edge on it escaped somehow up his throat, and Q found himself saying in a louder voice, eyes never leaving the muzzle of Bond’s gun as it remained trained on him, “Are you really threatening to shoot me, Silva?  Ha.  You don’t really know me that well at all.”  Being threatened with death had never felt more ridiculous, and without hesitation, Q slammed his head backwards.  Pain exploded against his skull, and he heard at least one roaring repercussion of a gun going off before his chair toppled onto the floor.

And everything went painful and black.  

~^~

_Q was dreaming.  He had to be dreaming, because death was full of nothingness, not visions of what could have been._

_Q was dreaming of a future in which Silva’s plan worked; a future in which James and Q were swallowed under Silva’s dark shadow, and became the scourge of the espionage world.  The scourge of the_ whole _world, if they weren’t being modest about it.  With three men, they were a force for chaos like the world had never seen, Silva with his connections, Q with his vast font of knowledge for the first time fully unleashed, and James with physical skills that went beyond instinct, beyond practice.  Q dreamt that he was teaching James to remember, insofar as he could.  There were no secrets now, in this dark future, and Q dreamt that he was holding a fencing sword in from of James - James Bond, from this lifetime, who knew how to use knives but had never handled a sword.  James Bond, from this lifetime, who was confused and angry and would never love Q.  James Bond, from this lifetime, who learned in a single day how to become a master swordsman.  “How…?” James asked in the dream, all bewilderment and wordlessly impotent temper, forced by circumstances he didn’t understand to betray his country, to go rogue._

_Q in the dream answered back robotically, wondering how it was the he didn’t feel any better now that the secrets were out, “I just got your body to remember.”_

_James’s glare was blistering; he was like a tiger thrust into the middle of a city, wild and dangerous but painfully out of place.  “This is insane.”_

_Q in the dream ignored Silva watching, gloating, from the sidelines, and dropped his fencing foil to his side with a tired arm.  Long ago, their positions had been reversed: James had taught Q how to fence.  Q still wasn’t very good at it.  James had just now surpassed him with ridiculous ease, his muscles and sinews falling into rhythms that his mind refused to recall.  “I know insane,” Q heard himself say hollowly, “and we’re not even there yet.”_

_And Silva smiled throughout the dream, because he knew that Q could make a peerless monster, a force of nature, out of James.  Q knew it, too.  And it hurt him._

~^~

Q awoke in a lot of pain and with the world tipped at the wrong angle.  He was staring out across the floor, and with his glasses wildly askew, it was difficult for him to tell at first that he was seeing Raoul Silva, very still and very bloody, just a short way from him.  It was difficult to muster any sort of relief or satisfaction, especially with his own weight cutting off circulation in his left arm - which was perhaps a mercy, because that limb had been a throbbing mass of pain before, and now he couldn’t feel it.  Q jolted and twisted as much as his bindings allowed at the sensation of fingers at his carotid, and saw James bending over him and checking his pulse.  The agent’s frowning expression was a complicated mixture of emotions, but he did look fiercely worried, among other things.  

“Q?  Q, can you hear me?” James was saying.

The Quartermaster blinked torpidly, everything in him still slow and disoriented.  “My ears are ringing,” he mumbled thickly.

“I’d imagine - Silva’s gun went off right next to your head.  It barely missed you,” James spoke more easily now that he knew he had an audience.  The banter felt… almost natural.  James must have switched his attention to checking Q over a bit more, because his next sentence was, “Fuck, Q, what did he do to your hand?”

Thankfully, before even waiting for an answer, James began tipping Q into a more tolerable position - with his hands attached by a loop of rope that ran under the chair, it wasn’t uncomfortable to be on his back, and saved him from the risk of falling again.  It was awkward to still be tied to the chair and staring at the ceiling, but that was about all Q felt fit to do right now.  Everything beneath Q’s skin, from his feelings to his brain, felt scrambled, and he didn’t want to think about anything - not his physical condition, not James’s reaction to all of this, not even how James had arrived so quickly when last Q had known James was absconding with M.  

While Q closed his eyes and tried very, very hard not to think, James was crouched at Q’s hip and inspecting his bindings - and his left wrist in particular.  “Q,” he tapped a brief but demanding fingertip on Q’s knee, getting his attention despite Q’s best efforts to detach himself, “Answer me.  What did he do?”

Q flinched as he felt James fiddling with the bindings, soon producing a knife to cut them.  Gulping and trying to collect at least a few pieces of himself, enough to answer, Q drew in a shuddering breath and managed, “I did that to myself, actually.  When Silva…”  Q swallowed again, realizing that he was giving away more and more about himself - but also realizing too late that he was still very drugged - and answering because he couldn’t stop, “Silva was starting to draw you into the conversation, baiting you.”

“And you... what?” James said, sounding exasperated or maybe testy.  Usually, Q could read James in a heartbeat, but his head was muddled.  Everything was difficult and confusing.  “Asked him politely to wreck your hand instead of picking on me?”

“No,” Q countered distractedly, “I yanked so hard that I think I dislocated my thumb and got my hand out.  Then the chair tipped and I landed on all of it, and probably dislocated some more things.  I don’t know.”  

James was silent.  Q stared at the ceiling so he didn’t have to see the look on his face.  A moment later, though, the rope gave way and both of Q’s arms were free.  James kept hold of the injured one, and Q decided that maybe that was a good thing - if it looked as bad as it felt with circulation returning, he didn’t want to see it.  “Did you shoot me?”  The question fell out as easily as the truths had earlier, unfiltered.  

There was a pause; James was working on his wrist, prodding it.  Q flinched and bit the inside of his cheek so as not to make a sound.  “No, I didn’t shoot you, Q,” the agent sighed after a beat, then went on ruefully and in a slightly chastising tone that Q figured he deserved - more than deserved, “After you smashed Silva’s nose with the back of your head and nearly got your ear shot off by Silva’s gun, I was able to get a clear shot at the bastard.”

“You could have shot me, you know.  To get him.  I meant it-”

“Q, just...  Just stop,” James snarled, and the room went quiet.  

The words hurt, and Q flinched and only then let out a little whimper.  He couldn’t take James’s temper right now, not even the small shadow of it he heard in the agent’s voice.  Suddenly the tears were threatening his eyes again, and he cradled his right, uninjured arm to his chest while he squeezed his eyes shut.  “James,” he whined very softly, “I think I’m going to vomit again.”

Part of Q sincerely expected James to ignore him.  The truths Q had been spouting earlier, which James had ended up hearing, weren’t easy to digest - even if James didn’t believe them - and in Q’s experience, people got angry when their world-views were challenged like this.  He was braced for James to punish him in petty ways, and was therefore surprised when the blond-haired man gripped him and the chair, tipping both.  Q began weakly purging his stomach of all it had before James could free his legs from the chair.  By the time Q was done dry-heaving, he was lying on his side, vaguely aware that the chair had been moved away but that the status quo otherwise had not changed: James was not talking, but was somewhere behind him, holding his injured left forearm again.  Q shuddered and curled in on himself, sensing James’s presence like a crippling cold.  

But like before, James started moving again.  It felt like he was wrapping something around Q’s wrist, which hurt, but the pain was a minor worry when Bond spoke next: “We need to get you to a hospital.”

Q had thought that he didn’t have it in him to move, but he got his limbs moving to twist around with all the clumsy speed at his disposal.  He gripped at James’s coat desperately - with both his good hand and his half-bandaged bad one, ignoring the way the latter felt like it had ground glass in it and was swollen and scraped bloody.  “No!  Nononono _no_ \- I can’t go to the hospital!” he said wildly, desperately searching James’s guardedly surprised blue eyes for any sign that he could find leeway there, find mercy.  

“You’ve been drugged with a dangerous, untested substance, and your wrist is a bloody wreck-” Bond tried to reason with patience that looked frayed and thin.  

“ _No_!” Q repeated again, aware that his voice was rising hysterically in pitch, “James, that same substance has me spilling secrets like water through a sieve, and…”  Q choked up, his next words painful as he realized how true they might be.  “...Even if you don’t care about _my_ secrets…”  And from the shuttered, unreadable look on Bond’s face, it seemed likely that he didn’t, that Q had burnt whatever bridge may have existed between them - cut it off like a limb, and cauterized the wound.  “...I also don’t want to hemorrhage information about MI6.”

Q was surprised when James had a ready answer, one that even softened his arctic blue eyes marginally, “I’ll be with you the whole time.  I’ll make sure you don’t say anything untoward.”  When Q tried to answer, but instead ended up cringing as the pain of his hand finally sliced through his panic, James took him by the forearms and gently but surely broke his grip; Q felt like a declawed kitten, strength-less and disarmed.  He could only struggle weakly, though, as James held him and said with implacable calmness, “Q, you need more medical help than I can give.”

“But what about-?” Q cast about, literally and figuratively, for an excuse.  He was imagining the hospital: its white walls, its rigidly scientific minds, its doctors in white coats.  With his mind already twisted up like a bird in a snare, it was impossible to remove those thoughts from memories of the insane asylum, as fresh as if he’d been committed yesterday.  Q could be sent back to that very easily.  “If I go there, and they hear me talking about my past lives, they’ll decide that I’m insane-” Q began to babble wildly, looking everywhere and starting to kick at the floor to try and back away from James and his belaying grip.  “-And they’ll lock me away, James!  Please, don’t- d-d-don’t _do_ that to me, _please-_!”

“Shit, Q, stop!” James grunted as the smaller man became sincerely hard to handle.  James was strong, but Q was desperate, and a body would do a lot of impossible things under the right pressure.  Realizing that he couldn’t just snap Q out of it on command, James quickly changed tactics and gathered Q close in a rush.  Only when the dark-haired young man was crushed to his chest, James’s arms enfolded around him (one behind Q’s head, pressing it up against Bond’s neck, the other feeling the sharp ridges of Q’s arched shoulder-blades) did Q cease his struggles.  Cocooned in James, Q quivered and shuddered and tried to remember how to function and breathe.  

“Shhhh,” James soothed.  It was the voice Q hadn’t known he’d needed; it was a balm on all his hurting places.  A balm couldn’t patch up all the wounds Q was carrying, soul-deep, but all Q really wanted right now was a reduction of the pain, and he got it as James showed mercy and held him close.  “Shhh.  No one’s going to take you away.  We’re just going to take you to medical professionals who can stabilize you and make sure this damned drug doesn’t kill you.”

“If it does, I’ll just come back,” Q mumbled, because he couldn’t help it.  

Q could feel the way Bond twitched, froze, and then had to recover from the reminder of Q’s strangeness.  With laudable but probably false calm, James said, “I know, Q.”  Then, in a wry voice that sounded more his own, James rallied and added, “But I’m not done talking to you yet, and since I don’t seem to remember any of this reincarnation business, I’ve only got this life to talk to you in - so hang on, all right?  Let me fix this.”

Q clutched at Bond and started sobbing, because that’s all he’d wanted to hear someone say to him for centuries.  

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Syngnōmēn ékhe_ =an Ancient Greek apology, I believe; Q was still language-switching, but the sentiment remained the same
> 
> It's time to start the fixing, but there's a bit of breaking yet to be done... one more chapter to go :)


	5. Hope Like Spiderwebbed Glass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q gets medical attention, but James also gets answers - truthful ones, because the truth serum is still very much working.
> 
> Or the chapter that was nearly named: re-breaking the bone (so it can heal)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I lied... this fic has six chapters. I literally miscounted my own chapters - but don't worry, it's all written and the last chapter will be posted by tomorrow or Sunday! :) 
> 
> And hey - that's more chapters for Q to get HUGS

So apparently M was with Moneypenny.  She hadn’t heard all of Q’s secrets, mostly because James had acted quickly the instant he got a call and realized that it was from Silva, and something was very, very wrong.  He’d dropped M off in a heartbeat, everyone agreeing that the danger had shifted - to Q.  So, as of now, M knew that Raoul Silva had taken her Quartermaster hostage, presumably for the information Q carried regarding MI6’s security systems.  Silva’s penchant for cyberattacks meant that Q was a rather obvious target, and no one seemed likely to question Q’s being taken or even given truth serum.  While they were waiting for an ambulance, Bond made a few more calls to get Silva’s body taken care of, but with enough discretion that Q’s history wouldn’t be discovered.  They’d have to find where Silva had stashed all of Q’s journals later.  

Q’s left thumb and wrist were both dislocated.  Besides that, he’d rubbed both wrists horrendously raw, and only his socks had saved his ankles from similar fates - although he already had vivid bruises forming to show just how valiantly he’d fought the restraints.  Or perhaps not valiantly, but madly.  When James sat by Q and heard the doctor’s prognosis on Q’s left wrist and hand, he’d looked equal parts disturbed and impressed.  Q had spent the whole time looking down and pressing his lips together, clenching his teeth until his jaws ached in an effort to keep himself from talking.  

Within the hour, Q’s wrists and hand were set to rights (everything relocated and bandaged), and a regime of medicine had been concocted to deal with the truth serum.  They’d gone to the nearest hospital via ambulance, which was not MI6, but Bond had efficiently pulled strings to get an MI6-certified doctor on-site.  As soon as the woman arrived (along with her extensive knowledge of the more exotic injuries and illnesses international spies picked up), things started to become less hectic and more calm.  Q no longer had to worry so much about getting chatty about MI6 secrets, but he continued to bite his tongue anyway, because he had many more damning things than just passwords and spy identities in his head.  By the time he’d been set up with an IV containing another serum that would hopefully start to counteract what Silva had given him, Q’s entire face ached, and he felt like he’d impacted his teeth.  And he was still terrified of speaking.  The doctor had admitted that she wasn’t sure how to counteract the drug entirely, because it was so novel, and really all they were doing was ensuring that Q didn’t go into shock or otherwise sicken and die before the drug wore off naturally.  

“So it’s still affecting him?” James, standing by Q’s bed while Q lay stiffly with mouth and eyes shut, asked the doctor.  

“Yes, and for how long, I don’t know.  It should fade, though,” the doctor said with some regret, then promised to post people at the door so only authorized personnel got in.  James further promised to stay in the room, and ensure that _no one_ got in without his express permission.  The doctor accepted that, because this was an unprecedented situation - usually, they’d have shipped Q back to MI6 Medical, but Silva’s recent security breach had made the place questionably safe.  Q would be just as well off here.  

“Q?”  Bond’s voice was questing, quiet - he clearly wasn’t sure whether Q was asleep or not.  

While he was in less pain, and also felt less shortness of breath and nausea, Q still felt too wretched to sleep any time soon.  He opened his eyes, turning his gaze to Bond obediently but fearfully.  He didn’t know what he’d see on James’s face, or how to handle it if he saw the anger that he feared he’d find.  Or the derision, if James just thought all of this to be a sign of severe mental illness in his poor, demented Quartermaster…

James’s expression was guarded, but at least that meant no obvious signs of temper or derision were visible.  Q still swallowed and sat up, bunching the thin hospital blanket beneath his right hand.  “Yes?”

“Are you all right?” the question surprised him.

And, because of the damn drugs, Q immediately replied in an anxious rasp, “I wish I were anywhere but here, but otherwise… yes.  I’m not hurting.”  Q quailed a little, looking down at his good hand tangled in the thin blanket, and felt the additional admission slip past his lips, “I’m also waiting for the interrogation to begin, because I’m still very much under the influence, and short of covering my own mouth, I don’t think I can keep quiet around you.”

The blond-haired man sighed, a deep, gusty, tired sound - it reflected a lot of what Q felt.  But then the agent approached the bed, sitting down on the visitor’s chair.  “I don’t want to interrogate you, Q.”

“And I don’t really want to run away, but if you leave this room for five minutes, I’ll do my best to disappear regardless,” the words fell out of Q’s mouth, and kept on coming like verbal traitors, “That’s what I was doing when Silva caught me - running away.  I’d ensured that you’d get your trail of breadcrumbs, but I wasn’t going to be where anyone could find me by the time you got back.”  Hating how uninhibited his own speech was, Q sagged forward over his knees, finishing his latest verbal diarrhea with a lackluster, “Fuck.”

Even James look a bit off-put by Q’s chatter, although he got his expression under control quickly.  Q hated that this James could do that, and found himself saying so, with a frustrated whine in his voice, “You’re so much harder to read in this lifetime.”

James just stared and blinked at him.  Finally, after a long moment of Q’s tired gaze meeting James’s carefully blank one, the agent finally broke and said, “I don’t know if I can get used to hearing that.”

Q sagged more.  His elbows were on his knees now, and only the inherently unbending quality of his humerus bones kept him from collapsing further on himself.  “So you don’t believe me?” he said softly, and with some amount of resignation.  Again, his mouth kept moving without his consent, “The last time I told you about my… condition… you didn’t believe me either.”

“And… when was that?” James was clearly struggling, but his words were polite.  

Q appreciated that.  With a sad half-smile, however, he observed without rancor, “You’re humoring me.”

“No,” James shook his head, but wouldn't say anything more.  It left Q as lost as he’d been before.  

With no other recourse or anything else to talk about, Q cast back in his memories, feeling strange talking about them aloud.  He wanted to fidget and scratch at the IV in the back of his right hand, but his left hand didn’t feel up to the task.  “It was in the seventeen-hundreds, I believe, when I told you last.  Fortunately, you humored me then, too, and accepted me as the amusing eccentric who for some reason wouldn’t go away.”

“I’m not just humoring you,” Bond repeated.

“I don’t believe you.”  While James gave another hefty sigh, Q once again focused on the back of his right hand, and found himself saying grumpily, “And this itches, but I can’t scratch it, because everything from my left elbow down hurts.”

This time, the breath that James let out sounded more… tolerant.  Fond?  “Are you fond of me?” Q found himself immediately asking as the thought transformed into verbal sound.  Why couldn’t the truth serum just go away and leave him alone?

Blue eyes flicked up from Q’s IV to Q’s eyes, and they seemed to soften a bit in a way that squeezed Q’s heart like a fist.  

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to ask that,” Q mumbled ashamedly, breaking away before the metaphorical fist could squeeze any tighter and kill him.  

“It’s all right, I know you can’t help it,” James said easily, and got up.  Q, looking down at his lap, listened to the agent move and held very still as the larger man transferred himself from the chair to the edge of the bed, sitting at Q’s left and reaching over to Q’s right hand.  He picked the hand up tentatively, as if expecting Q to pull away.  

“Stupid.”  The small word escaped, wrapped in wry amusement.

“What?”

Still not looking up, but feeling James’s hand gently on his and carefully checking the tape to make it more comfortable, Q went on inevitably, “You’re stupid.”

James actually sounded a bit amused as he replied, “Oh, I am, am I?”

James wasn’t going to like this answer, Q thought to himself, but he was going to hear it anyway.  “You think that I’m going to push you away, but you don’t understand how ridiculous that is.  You’re the only constant I’ve had for hundreds of years.   _I’ve_ had all that time to learn that I can’t - _won’t_ \- pull away from you.”  Q sniffled, wishing the tears would just run out already, although at least they were still behind his lashes right now.  It helped if he didn’t look at James, instead just focusing on the warmth of his touch, which was simple, uncomplicated, and _present_.  “You don’t…  Sometimes I wish you knew what it was like, always waiting for you.  Everyone else I know for a lifetime, and then they’re gone like a candle snuffing out, but you come back.  You’re like the north star.”  A streak of heat raced down Q’s nose and dripped off.  “And now I’m crying again.  Damn.  I’m sorry.”

“Stop apologizing, Q.”

“Okay.”  Silence and motionless stretched, and Q only stirred to speak again a long moment later, “Thank you for still holding my hand.  And not telling the doctors that I’ve had a mental break and need drugs to calm me down.  But mostly for holding my hand.”

The noise Bond made could only have been described as a strangled growl, and then a thickly muttered, “Fuck,” that really had a lot of emphasis behind it.  Then, again, with more words following, “ _Fuck_ , Q, I’m not going to have you measured for a straight-jacket, all right?  I…  I believe you.”

That was the biggest shock Q had had all day.  Possibly in decades.  He finally lifted his head, his sight a bit impeded because his glasses had slid down his nose.  “Come again?” he asked with fragile politeness and hope like spiderwebbed glass.  

James’s jaw was working like he was chewing on gristle, and for a moment he just sort of frowned at Q in tense consternation.  But then, with obvious effort, he grated out, “I said I believe you.  Silva was a psychotic bastard, but he gave a lot of facts that I can’t explain any other way.  And God knows, in this job, I’ve learned that there are a lot of things beyond my understanding.”  James let go of Q’s hand so that he could drag both palms down his tanned face, and while Q desperately missed the little point of contact, he felt elation spreading through his veins.  He still felt like a mass of broken glass inside, but now the pain started to feel worthwhile.  

As James’s hands dropped down, they paused over his jaw, making Q frown and cock his head questioningly.  Blue eyes thoughtful, the agent elaborated without prompting, “I think what really has me convinced is this.”  James tilted his head, and Q saw that James had been rubbing absently at the short white scar that curled over his jawbone.  The straight-razor incident was recalled to mind instantly.  “You knew that this was here before you even saw me, didn’t you?  How?”

“You pick up a lot of the same scars, lifetime after lifetime,” Q answered.  It felt so weird to speak of this aloud, and it was difficult to do.  His words felt stilted, inadequate, and he shrugged helplessly.  He had no practice explaining how his long lives with James worked.  “Even before you slept with me, I could have taken a guess at half a dozen other scars you have.  Some parts of history like to repeat.  You’re always the blond-haired, blue-eyed man who picks up scars and…”  Q’s voice dropped off.  He didn’t want to talk about this.  

Although James had said he didn’t want to interrogate Q, he was a spy in this lifetime: he was trained to hunt after secrets when he caught the scent.  “What?”

Q couldn’t help but answer, even though he hushed his voice as if that could make the words less real.  “And you’re the man who always gets into more trouble than I can get you out of.”  Q drew his legs up, wrapping his arms around them, and finished off the answer into his knees.  “And then leaves me alone again.”  Bond was Q’s polestar - but daylight always came, and no matter how hard Q stared into the sky, he could no longer see that point of familiar light amidst the faraway blue.  

Another soft curse fell from Bond’s lips, but this time it was accompanied by the man moving forward, and once again Q was gathered into a glorious hug.  Q hugged back so instantly and frantically that he didn’t heed his IV or his bandaged hand - and even after he noticed them, he didn’t _care_.  Fortunately for Q, Bond cared, and swore a few more times as he tried to keep Q from tearing the needle out of the back of his hand.  When Q saw Bond’s efforts but thought that James was trying to dislodge him, he yanked his arms back to himself, sharply and suddenly withdrawing his whole body.  

His emotions were still all over the place, making the sudden sting of perceived rejection sharper, like a stiletto between the ribs.  Ignoring James’s request to quit with the apologies, Q muttered in a voice that had gotten reedy with pain again, “I’m- I’m sorry.  Usually I can remember that… that this is a new life, and I haven’t really met you yet.  It’s just so hard to remember, you have no idea, to keep it all straight and remind myself that I have to befriend you all over again, and that you may not even want to become my friend this time around-”  He choked on his own words as they started running out of his mouth too quickly, getting bottlenecked in his throat.  Wounds that were usually hidden deeply were now so close to the surface that it was like they opened up at the slightest touch.  This time he tried to hide his face, because it was too humiliating to be seen crying _again_ , but then he remembered that both of his hands were either bandaged up or connected to tubes, and it was all so unfair-!

Bond moved.  The bed shifted.  Q was being shuffled to the side and there was a whole warm body beside him this time.  Q let loose an instant, heartrending keen and leaned in as arms pulled him, but even that sound couldn’t adequately express how agonizing this was - how wonderfully it hurt.  It was like going from frostbite to a hot bath, yearning for the heat but screaming into the steam.  It was like re-breaking a bone that had healed crookedly, because you were told it would help the healing.  It was also entirely impossible to believe that James was doing this for him: believing him, holding him, letting Q cling to him even after Q basically said, “ _Everything you know is a lie, and me most of all_.”

Carefully keeping the IV line free when Q once again decided that it was unimportant compared to the familiar heat of Bond’s body, James got the head of the bed to lift.  He and Q leaned back against it, and the agent murmured with a staidness that was also familiar, “I’m already your friend, even if we ignore the sex.  I might sleep with anybody, but I don’t let just anyone near me with a straight-razor.”  Perhaps he’d been hoping to get Q to laugh, but the dark-haired man didn’t have it in him.  He was listening, though, soaking it in.  “I want to understand, but I don’t want to make you say anything you don’t want to,” James finally said.  He had one armed behind Q’s back, and rubbed at Q’s right shoulder comfortingly.  “You’re drugged all to hell, and I don’t like the advantage that gives me.”

Q actually snorted, a slightly ugly sort of laugh.  “I think it rather evens the playing field,” Q argued, staring out across the planes of Bond’s chest, taking comfort in the steady rise and fall of it, “After all, I’ve got a sort of advantage myself, knowing things about you that I honestly shouldn’t.”

“Like what?” James challenged.

Tongue loosened, Q began speaking steadily but rapidly, economical sentences like a script being read - a script he’d had centuries to memorize.  Bond had asked, so he answered: “Your file says that you’re an only child, but I know that you always liked it that way.  People would pity you, ask if you were lonely, even your parents, but you were honestly never bothered - this is because you’ve never had brothers or sisters in any of your lifetimes.  You’ve always been an only child, so you’ve long ago gotten used to it.”  James was going very still and slowly stiffening, like a man turning into stone.  Q just kept on talking, no dam to hold back the words, “I know that when you first picked up a gun, it felt both wrong and right at the same time, in a way you couldn’t explain.  I remember that you felt the same thing when you first picked up a sabre - you were a natural at it, and had carried swords before, but you were used to a broadsword.  I know that you felt this because I’ve watched you pick up weapons that have evolved since you last held them.  You were incredibly skilled with a musket once, despite its notorious inaccuracy.  Oh….”  Q smiled fondly at a connected memory, his mind taking comfort in sinking into a nice piece of the past.  “...I once managed to keep hold of one of your blades through the ages.  It’s a Scramasax.  It was honestly breathtaking to watch you hold it again in another life when I managed to save it from the last, because you took to it like a fish to water.”  Q’s smile fell away, and he shifted restlessly; Bond’s arm locked around down him like it was natural.  “I still have it, unless bloody Silva confiscated that, too.”  

Twisting a little, Q looked up at Bond’s face with some trepidation, a troubled expression crossing his face as he noticed the way James’s expression had become a tightly-locked fortress.  “You should probably stop asking questions now, lest I give you answers you don’t want to hear,” Q said regretfully, but in a tone that said he understood.  Q hadn’t asked for any of this, but if he’d had a choice to ask or not to ask, he’d have opted for the latter.  James deserved that choice, that choice of not knowing.  “You can walk away now,” Q allowed further, once again curling his arms in.  He’d been gripping Bond’s shirt, but now he let go.  “I’ve always wanted that option, so I can say with certainty that… you will probably be happier if you walk away.”

Unexpectedly, James’s expression softened, like a glacier melting to show life - and warmth - beneath.  “Oh, Q,” was all he said at first, and Q gasped in surprise as calloused hands cupped his head and cheek, angling his head so that Bond could… just lean in.  Q could feel Bond’s breath and mouth and nose against the mass of fringe on his forehead.  “Even if this all sounds like a damn dream to me, it sounds like a fucking _nightmare_ to you.  I’m not going to just leave you in it.  I said we were friends, didn’t I?”

“I-!”  Q tried to respond, reflexively wanting to argue, but he couldn’t get the words out.  He couldn’t even think.  His brain had entirely short-circuited, because this James kept surprising him.  Of all the Jameses Q had met, this one had perhaps the least reason to trust him, being a 00-agent with such a dangerous and checkered history - and yet this James was going the furthest to believe him.  “You really don’t think I’m making this up?  Or that I’m crazy?” he finally managed to rasp out.

“In my line of work, I’ve seen crazy, and you’re not it,” James said candidly, lips still moving against Q’s hair.  He added after obvious, heavy consideration, “And I’ve seen liars, and you’re not that either.”  Pulling Q closer as the slighter man began to tremble and shake like his seams were being steadily ripped out, revealing the mess beneath, James finished at a husky whisper, “Most people lie and make things up to make themselves happier, but that sure as hell doesn’t seem to be what you’re doing.  I don’t think anyone would lie like this.”  He tipped Q’s head just a little more, enough so that he could press the most reassuring kiss Q had ever felt against his forehead.  

~^~

Q didn’t realize that he’d fallen asleep against Bond’s chest until he woke up to the smell of his own flesh burning.  

The smell felt like it awoke coals in Q’s flesh, and he woke up thrashing, fighting.  Soldiers developed reflexes to deal with the sounds of an enemy ambush, muscles on hair-trigger reflexes for that sound of a twig snapping, that unexpected rustle of a body too close - Q had the same reflexes for being burned.  He knew with visceral certainty that he had to react fast or repeat the most terrible death he could remember, and it took nearly a full three minutes of struggling and James shouting at him for Q to realize… that he wasn’t actually burning.  Coming slowly awake, blinking owlishly and noting that he didn’t have his glasses on, Q registered that the only pain he felt came from previous aches and bruises, the IV he’d torn out of his hand, and the crushing pressure of James’s arms around his middle trying to hold him still.  The smell came from a food tray to the side of the bed, which Q was too nearsighted to specifically identify, but was apparently some sort of cooked meat.  Right now, coming down from the height of terror, it still nearly turned Q’s stomach.  

The door opened and two nurses popped their heads in, probably wondering what the ruckus was.  Q just stared at them stupidly while Bond continued to hold him in an unrelenting bear-hug, although the agent’s voice broke through Q’s thoughts a beat later: “It’s all right, Q.  You’re here, with me, and you’re safe.”  The voice, more than the words, had Q’s muscles relaxing; he hadn’t realized that he was still pulling against Bond’s arms, and ceased.  

When Q looked around sheepishly and muttered sorry, James finally started loosening his grip, also informing the nurses that everything was under control.  Most medical staff wouldn’t have listened, but these were probably MI6-issue, sent to make sure the Quartermaster had the best care, and they knew not to question the word of a man with a licence to kill - even if that man was clearly in bed with said Quartermaster.  As Q subsided back against Bond’s chest, shaking and still staring at the food with a sick feeling, James finally asked, “What happened?  You woke up like a snake bit you or something.”

“I…” Q started tremulously, and out of the corner of his eye he saw James turned his blond head, following Q’s eyes.  Q realized there was no alternative, and sighed, “I thought I was on fire.  My first death was being burnt at the stake as a witch, and for ages after that, the smell of cooked meat gave me flashbacks…”  Q’s stomach gave an uncomfortable flip, and he reached up tentatively to grip one of Bond’s strong forearms, needing the solidity more than fearing the rebuff.  “I woke up thinking I could smell my flesh burning.  It was just lunch, though, wasn’t it?”

Q didn’t need to look over to know that James was staring at him, horrified; it was translating through the humming tension in the man’s body.  “Dinner, actually,” James still somehow managed to say, albeit in a slightly hollow voice, “You slept right through lunch.”  There was a pause, and Q’s peripheral vision caught James shaking his head before muttering, “Bloody hell, Q.”

“Yeah, that pretty much covers it,” Q tried to laugh it off, but managed only a halfhearted smile.  He tried to breathe through his mouth, because he couldn’t shake the memories of the smell.  “I haven’t had a flashback like that in lifetimes, but I suppose everything had gone to shit, so why not add forced vegetarianism to the list?”  Breaching through his mouth didn’t help; now he could taste it, like his own charred tongue as he inhaled the rising flames…  Q squeezed his eyes shut and gagged, body curling.  

Bond immediately let go, sliding lithely off the bed and making a beeline for the food-tray.  He scooped it up and continued on towards the door with a doggedness visible in his very posture.  “I’m going to get rid of this,” James explained himself, pausing once at the door to glance back.  Q couldn’t see his face without glasses, but presumed there was a slight grimace before the blond-haired man added, “And maybe call back one of those nurses to put your IV back in.  Can you put pressure on that?”

Instead of answering, Q simply did so, gathering up part of the blanket and pressing it to the back of his hand obediently.  He could discern James’s approving nod.  “I’ll be right back, Q, I promise,” James assured in a more gentle voice, then slipped out.  

Q sat there for about two minutes, breathing in the lingering scent of cooked meat, feeling defeated in some ineffable way as he realized that even his oldest phobia was coming back to bite him in the arse.  He looked down at his hand, where the blanket was doing a good job of stopping the bleeding, although he could feel that the tape was still there, tugging at his skin.  On autopilot, he tore a strip off the blanket, wrapping it around his hand and then using the residual tape to hold it in place.  Next he got off the bed, glad that they’d let him keep his own pants and trousers, because it meant that all he had to do was shirk the hospital gown top and then go over to where his clothes had been folded on a nearby table.  His glasses were on the bedside table, too.

It was all reflex.  The same reflex that had had him packing up and leaving MI6 right before Silva caught him; the same reflex that had governed his life for a long time now, ever since he’d learned the dangers faced by a person like himself, when secrecy was no longer an option, and his strangeness became known.  James was out, and this was likely the only chance that Q would have of slipping out unnoticed.  He could disappear, and drag his knowledge with him like some sort of venomous shadow in his wake, before anything truly bad could happen.  

Q didn’t realize that the door had even opened until he turned around, dressed and ready to escape, only to find Bond leaning against the closed door.  Q froze.  

Blue eyes as cool and unreadable as the front of a glacier, the agent regarded Q unblinkingly, arms folded.  There was a tray of new food, but it had been placed on the floor with the same silence that Bond had entered with - the man knew when to be as quiet as a wraith when he wanted to be.  “Going somewhere, Q?” he asked quietly.  

Q felt like he couldn’t breathe, much less answer.  Caught-out, he just stood where he was awkwardly until James shifted his weight a little, eyes sharpening to reveal something like frustration, maybe the hot spark of ire.  “Do you really want to leave?” the agent asked next when his first question garnered no response.  

This time, Q forced in a bit of air past his tight throat, a little wheeze on the inhale.  On the exhale, he was able to admit resignedly, “No.”

“Then why are you all dressed and ready to go?”

Somehow, even though his body felt stiff, sore, and somehow frozen, Q shrugged.  “I told you that if I had a chance, I’d run.  I meant it, I wasn’t lying.  But…”

“But?”  Bond pressed with both eyebrows raising imperiously.  Yes, he was definitely a bit angry.  

Q sagged, feeling suddenly and entirely defeated.  “But now that you’re here, I can’t.”

“Why?”  Challenge lined the word.

“Because when you asked me if I _wanted_ to leave just now, I wasn’t lying either,” Q bit back with what little energy he had left in him, bristling tiredly, “I don’t want to leave you.”  He hung his head, leaning on the visitor’s chair with both hands until he remember that one of his wrists wasn’t exactly in working order.  With a pained hiss, he switched his weight to the other.  He admitted while the pain in his left wrist was still sharp and scalding, “I never want to leave you.  But I’ve messed this up, and I can’t help but think that the best thing would be for me to leave.  To… ‘darken your door no more,’ as the saying goes.”  The upward quirk of Q’s lips in no way implied humor.  

“Q…”  Bond was starting to look a bit lost, and Q in turn began to wonder if Bond’s posture was less an expression of defensiveness and more an expression of not knowing what to do with his hands, making tucking them away the best option.  “Q, I already told you I believed you - there’s no need to make a break for it.”

“Yes, but…”  If Bond was lost, then what was Q?  This had never happened before, not in all his years of life, not in all of his many lives.  He wasn’t sure of anything: he wasn’t sure what he wanted, he wasn’t even sure what _mattered_.  He thought he knew, but wasn’t sure now, so he asked, “But do you _want_ me?”  The attempt to keep the dejection out of his tone failed horribly, and the knowledge that his emotions were laid so bare made him shrink in on himself, shoulders rising up around his ears.  Now that he’d said it, though, he was desperate for the answer, so his eyes remained wild and unblinking on James’s face.  

James’s face, which suddenly turned incredibly understanding and sad.  “Of course I want you to stay, Q.”

“ _Why_?”  The question came out desperate and broken, and Q now felt more like he was hiding behind the chair than anything else.  His voice got louder as the truth began to boil out, fears taking shape and sound, “Haven’t you been paying attention for the past twenty-four hours!?  I went from Quartermaster to lunatic - and that’s not even taking into account my reincarnating, that’s just considering my rampant phobias, my borderline psychopathy, and my frankly creepy obsession with you!”

“Q, I’m a spy.  I stalk people for a living, and my psych evals aren’t exactly pretty.”

“But I’ve had multiple nervous breakdowns just since entering this hospital,” Q shot back viciously.  Then he sagged, metaphorical hackles lowering and a soul-deep exhaustion taking its place.  Leaning more heavily on the back of the visitor’s chair, Q finished at a whimper, “James, don’t you _see_?  I’m just a pretty smile over an awful lot of broken, bloody pieces, and sometimes I can’t even get the pretty smile part right.”  

There was silence like a wall between them, thick and impenetrable.  Q was feeling all of the weight of his many lives, and it felt like the pressure of them forced more words out, slow and fatigued but true, “Do you know why I’ve only told you stories of _you_?”  James hesitated, then shook his head, expression cagy again - the look of an agent facing a threat he didn’t understand.  Q knew the look already.  It made him sad, but it didn’t surprise him into see that look being directed at him now.  “Because you’re the interesting one, the adventurer, the hero, but most of all - because even when you die, your stories are the ones with happy endings.  Because to have a happy ending, you must _end_.”  Q tapped his bandaged bad hand on the chair in soft emphasis.  He wanted James to understand.  “Your stories read like adventure novels, but I just have one long memoir that reads…”  Q choked up.  He hadn’t realized he was this close to crying.  Again.  The explanation hadn’t unfolded like he’d expected, and now the truth of it was hitting him as hard as anyone else, and it _hurt_.  He dragged the next words out as if through broken glass, drooping forward over the one shaking hand he still had braced on the chair, “...More like a eulogy with every chapter.”  Realizing he was sobbing and also realizing that he had no hope of pulling himself together because he was in so many pieces, Q hiccuped as he finished desperately, “James, I’m just too broken by this point to be worthwhile to anyone.   _God…_ ”  Pushing his fingertips up under his glasses - wrist throbbing again - Q buried his face in his hands and faced the knowledge that minds like his weren’t meant to survive forever.  No mind was.  

He’d nearly forgotten that James was in the room, feeling so alone.  Q jerked in visceral shock as he felt a warm touch to his shoulder, and while the touch disappeared at first - obviously noticing how Q pulled away like a cat from water - it returned, heavier and more sure.  Bond’s other hand found his other shoulder, gripping firmly and turning Q around despite the dark-haired young man’s resistance.  Soon he was tucked into the lee of Bond’s body again, tears smearing along James’s throat while James rocked them both slowly.  

“Q,” James said, letting the name sink like a baited hook, albeit a benevolent one.  The words vibrated against Q’s front where he was cocooned against James’s chest, powerful arms locked around him.  “I’m going to hold onto you-” James went on steadily.  So steadily.  His chin rubbed Q’s head.  “-Until you believe me when I say _everything is going to be all right_.  I don’t want you to disappear.”  Q had had his hands folded up in between their bodies like broken wings, but now he dared to turn his right hand, furling his fingers in Bond’s shirt.  “I may not remember these lives that you remember me living,” James admitted, and this time he didn't stutter over mentioning past lives, and that more than anything made Q hope, “but I can tell you that I don’t usually warm up to a new Quartermaster this fast.  I don’t usually warm up to _anyone_.”  This last admission was said a bit grimly, and was followed by a brief pause, in which they just continued to rock, and Q hooked the fingers of his other hand in James’s shirt-collar, “And you know what matters most to me?”

This is what Q wanted to know.  He strained to listen like a drowning man straining for air.  He wanted to know what mattered.  

Right now, he wanted to know that _he_ mattered.  

James’s hand rode up the ridge of Q’s spine to cup the back of his head, pressing Q’s nose against the hollow of James’s throat, as if giving him permission to hide there.  “What matters?” Q whispered, desperate.  

“Putting you back together again.”  James angled his head so that he could press warm, familiarly chapped lips against Q’s ear, something between a reassuring nuzzle and a fond kiss.  Q felt like it sank right into his skin, tattoo-like, earthquake-like.  And what was more, James sounded entirely sincere as he murmured, “I get the feeling that you’ve been spending a lot of lifetimes keeping me together, as crazy as that sounds, and if nothing else, you’re a damn good Quartermaster - and I’m too old to break in another one.”

Just as Q’s sobs turned into startled, slightly choked laughter, a nurse came back in.  No doubt the fellow came at Bond’s behest to put Q’s IV back in, but thanks to the tray Bond had left on the floor, the poor nurse tripped and went sprawling across the floor instead.  It was so ridiculous that Q felt safe raising his head from Bond’s clavicle, both men barking out surprised laughs as the nurse tried to recover his dignity.  

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There we go :) _Now_ there is one more chapter left to post! And that last chapter is the one that gets explicit, and also that gets a lot of the comfort I've been promising the patch up the hurt. There's still a bit of hurt... but I fix it!


	6. Kintsukuroi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q has given out his secrets - now now James finally starts asking questions on his own. And perhaps that's how healing starts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: this is also a chapter with some explicit sexual content :) You had some at the beginning - I figured I'd give you some at the end, too! 
> 
> Also, before you move through this last chapter (it's really the last one this time, I promise): keep an eye out for three more 00Q Festival fics! I think that July 23, 24, and 27 are their respective posting dates, and of course I'll keep updating ['Sciamachy'](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11539368/chapters/25908843) during that whole time.

After that… Q slept.  Just how much he slept surprised even him, as he found himself napping and dozing off at frequent intervals even after he was released from the hospital.  Bond explained it away to M by saying that Q had never been tortured before, and besides the drug having lingering soporific symptoms, was recovering emotionally.  Bond sold the lie (half-lie, really) so well that he secured Q a full two weeks of leave.  

And Q needed it.  Far more than he even realized.  

“Q, you’re suffering from emotional trauma - long-term emotional trauma,” James tried to explain, and this time he was dealing in whole-truths instead of half-lies, “I’m not going to pretend that I understand all that you’ve gone through, but you’re basically recovering from massive stress.  Your body is going to demand rest.”

“But it’s like I’m always asleep!” Q complained, pacing even as he felt his limbs getting leaden.  

“Yes, and if someone had just just endured a funeral of a dear friend, you’d expect them to be exhausted, right?” James said, and it was damnably annoying when he was logical like this.  He looked so self-assured and annoyingly calm, sprawled easily on the sofa in Q’s flat, “Q, how many times have you gone to my funeral?”

It felt so surreal still, so strange, to have James talking about this.  It made Q miss a step in his pacing, stumbling on stockinged feet.  Flushing in embarrassment, Q nonetheless grudgingly answered, “Quite a few.”

“And how many times have you let yourself just rest afterwards?”

That was the truly damning question, because Q in this lifetime, as the workaholic Quartermaster, really wasn’t all that different from his past selves, such that he’d thrown himself into productive activities at the slightest provocation.  Whenever James died, he basically tried to work himself to death every time.  Surprised that Bond was, for once, pegging Q for a past behavior, Q stopped wearing a path in the floor and turned to look at him.  James’s rugged face was turned to him placidly.  

“I’m not dead, Q, but you’re dealing with a change that is like a kind of death,” James said with infinite gentleness and patience, and a kind of wisdom that even Q wasn’t expecting - not from a man who didn’t recall that he’d lived scores of other lives, “You feared that I would die - and you feared that you would be hurt worse than death.  And now that the danger is lifted, the adrenalin is all gone, and your body is demanding you recover.  Time to pay the piper, Q.   _Sleep_.”  

The last word, at least, sounded more like the James Q knew: demanding, impatient, and hiding a sort of faint fondness under lots of exasperation.  Q gave in and went to sleep, and awoke ten hours later to James cooking vegetarian lasagna in Q’s usually barren little kitchen.

 ~^~

Q was still struggling with exhaustion when James got called for a mission.  Up until now, in the wake of Silva’s attack, a lot of agents had been kept close to home, so James had been around to watch Q - a job that included but was not limited to: making sure Q slept and ate like a normal human being, making sure Q didn’t give in to his instincts to run away, and (especially as Q started feeling a bit less like broken crockery) making sure that Q didn’t try to throw himself back into his work before he was ready.  “You’re on holiday, remember?” Bond pointed out at one time, coming up to Q and pushing the boffin’s laptop pointedly closed.  The majority of MI6 was still in something of an uproar if not a shambles, and while most of Q’s thoughts were still wrapped around James, enough of his ‘Quartermaster tendencies’ were awakening to make Q feel obligated to work.  

As it was, MI6 agreed with James: Q was to just recuperate and let others handle it.  Q had been there to see James explain why Q not only deserved but needed this time off, so perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised at how easily MI6 was letting him off the hook, work-wise: James was a frankly awe-inspiring liar.  Q had never met a James that was this good at spinning falsehoods, and even Q himself began to have a hard time recalling where the truth let off and the lie began as James gave M a plausible description of what had happened to Q at Silva’s hands.  

So, Q got leave, and for awhile, so did James.  No one actually _said_ that James was acting as a babysitter, but no one questioned James’s absence - and if anyone knew that 007 was almost constantly at Q’s flat, they didn’t mention it.  It soon became apparent that this companionship was as much for Q’s benefit as for James’s, however.  “Have I done this before?” James asked one morning as he made Q a cuppa, his blue eyes narrowed at the mug.  

Curled up on the couch and physically fighting the urge to be in James’s personal space (a constant struggle, if Q were being honest), Q blinked at James for a moment, nonplussed, and then rebooted his mouth to say, “You usually make my tea wrong only a few times, and then you seem to remember, in your own way.”  It was always slightly frustrating, the way Bond’s instincts and body seemed to recall things, even as his mind stayed permanently in the dark.  Still, it was incredibly novel to have James asking.

And the agent continued to ask questions: “Have I done this before?” became something of a regular query around the flat, and most of the time, Q answered yes, often tagging on a little story.  It became increasingly natural to talk about the past as if it were _normal_ , and that probably did more for Q’s healing than the sleep did.  He started to get more animated, less like a skittish ghost in his own home - in his own skin - and would tell stories unprompted, simply because he wanted to.  Sometimes because he’d wanted to for lifetimes.  “It’s always incredible to watch you relearn things,” Q said at one point, as they played a game of chess on Q’s table.  Q was letting James win, and James was letting Q let him win without complaint.  “To be fair, though, you’re always a fast learner.  I remember when you learned how to shoot a bow for the first time - they were terribly primitive things at the time.”  Q moved a knight, paying less attention to the game and more to his story, starting to smile.  “Someone had insulted you and your friends, I believe, but before you could properly teach them the usefulness of manners, they turned and left.”

“Sounds like I was quite a prideful sod,” James opined, making his own move.

Q’s hand darted out without thinking, countering.  “Maybe just a bit more than you are now.”  He watched James’s hand more to count the little scars on the back than because he was anxious about what move he’d make.  “Anyway, you weren’t an archer by any means, but someone just happened to have a bow on hand - so while those rude bastards strutted away, you borrowed said bow, and after four tries, managed to bury an arrow in a tree not a meter ahead of their leader.  Fortunately, the first three misses were so abysmal that no one but your friends noticed.”  

By now, James was leaning back from the table, looking amused.  “And who lent me the bow?” he asked with all the keenness of an agent trained to zero in on the hidden facts.

Smiling down demurely at the chessboard, Q made his next move, mood softening into something melancholic but fond.  “It was me.  This was probably the only lifetime I recall in which I learned a weapon before you did.  Of course, that meant I had to spend the next three weeks teaching you to actually shoot, because you’d be seeing those men at a gathering later.”

“It seems like you’re a rather good teacher.  At least, I presume that all went well.”

“It did.  But then again, you’re a quick study when you bother to listen.”

“And you’re not a bad chess player when you stop purposefully losing,” James replied back easily, indicating the board when Q’s brows furrowed.  

Q looked down, tumbling out of his story and back into the present to notice the pieces on the board.  “Oh,” he said, flushing, “Um… er… that’s checkmate, isn’t it?”  

The ability to tell stories and show off his skills came more and more easily as the days passed, and it was the closest thing to contentment that Q had felt in a very, very long time.  Therefore, it terrified Q more than ever when the inevitable call came in, saying that James was needed out in the field.  In fact, it scared Q so much that he entirely disregarded any plans he’d had for keeping his distance and remembering that this James had only known him for a short time period, instead ending up glomped onto the agent’s front when the man mentioned leaving.  

Fortunately, James didn’t appear entirely surprised by this reaction - or, at least, he didn’t appear intolerant of it.  “Q, I’ve got to go,” he said quietly and patiently, in the tone of voice used on small clingy children or very badly abused animals, “This is my job.”

“I know,” Q whined against Bond’s shirt-collar, his reason and his instincts at war, his brain and his heart in similar straits.  He knew that he should unclench his hands, but started shaking every time he tried to.  “I know and…”  The slim young man sucked in an unstable breath, and compromised with himself: as he nuzzled shamelessly against Bond’s throat, he got his hands to let go.  Then, with effort that felt a lot like tearing off a limb, he stepped back, knowing that his eyes were red but not caring.  “...I told myself long ago that I wouldn’t change you.  I _can’t_ change you.”  He made a helpless gesture at James in general, managing a lopsided smile, then had to tuck his hands under his armpits to keep from reaching out again.  The smile couldn’t last, and the stringing heat in his eyes meant he was going to cry again if he wasn't careful.  “God, please come back,” he gasped softly, squeezing his traitorous eyes shut and ducking his chin down against his chest as if that could hide the pathetic mumble, “I haven’t ever had you like this before, and I’m not ready to lose it.  Not yet.  I’m…”  ‘ _I’m not healed enough yet.  I was nearly too broken to fix, but the glue hasn’t hardened between the pieces of me yet, and I won’t make it on my own this way_.’

This time when James came up to Q - the hug was inevitable, but no less valuable for its expectedness - the agent’s gun-calloused hands cupped Q’s jaw, lifting his head.  He caught Q’s lips in a testing, close-lipped kiss, which Q returned with the same immediacy as last time.  Soon they were pressing tongues past teeth, and Q had untucked his hands to curl them over James’s wrists.  Like a hand stroking down a cat’s back, it calmed Q, and he felt almost pleasantly drugged by the time they parted.  

“You did that last time, too,” Bond observed, tongue darting out as if to taste Q against his lips.  

Q’s eyes, heavy-lidded and content for the moment, followed the motion.  He soaked in the feeling of the strong hands still cradling his face, the hard angles of wrist-bones beneath his fingers.  “Did what?”

“Kissed back like you knew me.”  

“Can’t help it,” Q replied shortly and mostly unapologetically, eyes still on James’s mouth.  He wanted more of whatever he could get, because the small, scared part of his soul kept screaming at him that he’d never see James again, that he’d never come back - not in this lifetime.  The logical part of Q was twisted up in guilty, sick knots, however, telling him that what he was fishing for was a pity-fuck, plain and simple.  But Q had settled for worse, so he found himself leaning in anyway, murmuring, “Stay, and I’ll fuck you like I know you, too.”

“Bloody hell, that’s tempting,” James groaned, giving in to Q’s wheedling enough for another kiss, one more searing.  But he still ultimately pulled back, and said with a frustrating amount of keen observation, “But since I can see in your eyes how much you hate yourself for saying that right now, I think it’s a bad idea.  However-” Before Q could argue, James leaned forward again, kissing over one of Q’s eyes and then the other.  With Q’s eyes closed and James’s fingers buried in thick dark hair, the agent rumbled, low and sincere, “-That’s a fucking hot mental image, and something to come back to.  If you promise not to run away on me, I promise to come back, okay?”  When Q’s eyes fluttered open, it was to an achingly earnest look and eyes as blue as winter-skies.  “If you won’t make a ghost of yourself, neither will I,” James managed to joke with a crooked but hopeful smile that cracked Q’s heart like an egg and crawled inside.  

Q couldn’t help but smile in return and soften.  He gave the wrists in his grip a loving squeeze.  “Okay,” he agreed.  

And Q stayed.  

And James came back.  

And as the years went on - Q returning to his duties as Quartermaster, haranguing agents like James for not returning their tech, and always getting those same agents back home again even if he had to move Heaven and Hell to do it - James continued to come back to Q, although it was actually nearly half a year before Q’s promise of sex actually came to fruition.  This was because it took that long for Q to accept that his world wasn’t a slowly burning room, and James not only believed him but was definitely growing to like him.  Five months later and Q’s real self was very nearly as calm and steady as his Quartermaster self, and James had apparently gone half mad waiting for him - but the wait was worth it.  Q’s desperation for sex was no longer tangled up in a desperation for another person to understand him and keep his demons at bay, and he no longer just wanted sex so he’d have one good memory to tuck away amidst the horrors and the loss.  

This James understood him, and knew him.  And still wanted him, even after seeing how broken Q was.  

While James didn’t magically remember all of his past lives with the introduction of sex, the experience was still a night to remember.  Neither of them got much sleep, and Q did indeed show all the ways in which he knew James’s body - and revelled in reacquainting himself with it in a way he hadn’t dared to back in Macao.  James gasped appreciatively as Q rolled them over, going from beneath James to above him, before slowly but steadily seating himself on Bond’s erect cock.  Q shuddered and closed his eyes, lips parting on a slow sigh as he felt James push so deeply into him, but what really made him shiver and moan was the reverent way that James’s hands stroked up his thighs, coming up to cup his ribs, one eventually finding a place with fingers splayed across Q’s heart.  It stayed there was Q began to ride James, a steady point of contact that Q pressed into even as he levered himself up and down and saw sparks as Bond’s thick cock pistoned into him and stroked all the right places inside of him.  When they both came, Q insisted on keeping Bond inside of him, even as they were both wracked with little aftershocks and shivers, Q nearly wet-eyed with over-stimulation and body pleasantly weak.  Knees bracketing Bond’s sides and Bond’s deep panting breath filling his ears, Q bent over the muscular body beneath him and kissed each scar as if erasing the memories of how Bond had gotten them - in this life or past ones.  

When Bond’s spent cock eventually slipped out of him, Q hissed, then lifted his head with his lips dragging across Bond’s stubbled jaw.  “Finger me?” he asked, begged rather.  

“There’s no way you’re ready for another round,” Bond teased, making a play for Q’s equally limp cock - which definitely needed a bit of time before it would stiffen with interest again.

But that wasn’t what Q was asking for, and he loosed a frustrated little growl and pressed his body closer.  Bond made a noise of complaint as Q’s weight pressed down on his own oversensitive cock, but he didn’t push the other man away as Q rested his cheek against James’s, gasping in his ear, “I just…  I want to feel you inside me.  I just…”  He keened, not sure how to voice the wild hunger still pacing fretfully under his skin, driving him mad.  “I... I need more, but-!  Not to fuck me, only…  Fill me, please?”  He rubbed his cheek against Bond’s ear like a cat seeking attention, even as his fingertips dimpled the skin of Bond’s shoulder and pectoral in two needy grips.  

Thankfully, even though James only knew Q in this life, he seemed to know what his Quartermaster needed without any more explanation than that.  

“Here.  Roll over.  On your side,” James commanded with great gentleness.  Still making little noises of desperation in his throat, Q nonetheless obeyed, and even managed to stay mostly still as James settled down behind him.  They’d slept like this quite a lot already - no sex, just spooned against one another, as Q slowly accepted that this wasn’t a dream but a reality he could both fall asleep to and wake up to, morning breath and all.  Now, James propped himself up on one elbow, leaning over and watching Q’s face as one of Bond’s big, tanned hands stroked possessively over Q’s right buttock and slipped without preamble towards Q’s already-slicked hole.  When he pressed in, Q’s body jerked as if electrified, eyes closing and mouth falling open in a sharp intake of air.  “Too much?” Bond asked, one finger working in and out slowly.  

Q was aware that there was both lube and cum smearing down his arse and thighs, probably wetting Bond’s fingers and knuckles, too.  The image had him shuddering and arching his head back until it hit Bond’s other arm, even as the visceral proof of connection and closeness liquified something in Q’s core.  “Just right,” he breathed in reply, and then cried out as Bond’s finger just brushed that over-sensitive part inside of him, and that spark of madness woke up again.  “More!” he choked out, pressing back against Bond’s finger, and kept up his demands until James was tugging at his hole with two fingers, sometimes pressing back in the mess that they’d both made - filling Q up again in just the way he was craving right now.  The near-pain of too much sensation had tears spilling down Q’s cheeks before long, but for the first time in what felt like forever, he was crying from pleasure.  

It wasn’t until James abruptly pushed Q onto his back, ducking between Q’s legs to begin cleaning him out in earnest that Q realized Bond was pretty moved by this, too.  Q keened and arched, his body wanting to get away and get closer all at once, as Bond hooked one finger at the edge of Q’s hole while simultaneously licking inwards as deeply as he could with his tongue.  An onlooker might have called it dirty, but as Q’s heels dug into Bond’s flexing shoulders, and cum and lube smeared onto them both, it was the most beautiful thing Q could ever remember.  At some point, Q was pretty sure that he came, dry, a delirious whiteness blotting out everything else as he climaxed again, before his body slipped into the most perfect, dreamless, happy blackness.  

He woke up sometime later to Bond behind him, kissing his neck, arms wrapped around him possessively.  It didn’t take much after that for the rest of Q’s body to wake up, rested and ready again, and they made love more gently and less desperately this time - both on their side, Bond's hand working Q’s cock gently and rocking into him in tandem.  They didn’t even need words this time, and after Bond clutched Q close and buried himself deep one last time, they both rocketed towards an electric but almost silent climax together.  

Q would always be able to look back on this night as the first of many.  He had James now, as he never had before - and the sex was just a small fraction of it.  Because if Q woke up from a nightmare in the night, he could not only depend upon James to be there (if he could, missions allowing), but for the first time… Q could say brokenly, “I dreamt of the first time you died,” and know that the blond-haired man would understand.  

~^~

Not even the most beautiful things could last forever.  

James died in 2032 at the age of sixty-four.  Q actually got to die with him - car crash, as a drunk driver swerved into their lane.  James had retired as an agent, but still had more than enough driving skills to have avoided the drunk wanker, but only if he wanted to hit the mother and two daughters strolling on the pavement next to them.  

“You always have such a moral center,” eighteen-year-old Quint Grey said to the old but well-cared-for gravestone at the Eastern London Cemetery, “and at least you had the decency to die with me for once, so I suppose I can’t be mad.”  Q didn’t spare a glance for his own gravestone, just to the left.  The sight of his own headstones always made him anxious, but there was something soothing about visiting James's.  “I swear, I’m still surprised that I didn’t recover and linger on while you died, because usually that’s my luck.”  The teenager scuffed his boot against the grass, unaccountably shy, even as an old melancholy made his throat tight and his smile crooked.  He pushed his hair back and quietly cursed his mother in this life for always insisting that he keep it this short, because it felt like the nape of his neck was always cold, and his forehead felt naked.  His parents both thought that he was visiting friends; they themselves lived in Scotland.  Q always wondered if Bond would have preferred to have been buried there, closer to his roots - but this graveyard was closer to M, and she and MI6 had always had a closer hold on Bond’s heart than Skyfall or childhood memories.  Q had just wanted to be buried where James was.  And he hadn’t really lied to his parents: he was visiting a friend.  

“I haven’t found you yet in this lifetime,” Quint said, hunching his shoulders so that he could breathe into his scarf and warm up his chin and mouth.  “Even when you’re not a spy, you’re damnably hard to find.”  Lifting his head, sighing out a puff of air that instantly fogged, Q admitted a bit weakly, “I’m not honestly sure what I’ll do when I find you, though.  I mean… it’s a bit hard to go back to square one when I got so used to just telling you everything.  I miss telling you everything.”

“Good, because I miss hearing it.”

Q nearly had a heart attack, and almost fell on his arse just in the act of spinning around.  As it was, he had to catch himself against Bond’s headstone, and stepped on at least one of the wild roses he’d brought to liven up the grave.  But he didn’t care, because as much as Q did his best to respect the resting places of the only other person he’d known since the beginning, right now all he cared about was the familiar voice coming from behind him.  

Alert blue eyes looking at Q from beneath messy blond hair, skin tanned despite the perpetually cloudy London weather.  James looked about eighteen himself, maybe a bit older, gangly with youth - but still achingly familiar.  “It’s Q, right?” the blond-haired boy asked.

Unsure how to breathe, the other boy squeaked out breathlessly, “Yes.  Well… it’s Quint, actually.”

The other boy persisted, though: “It _is_ Q, though, yes?  Even though you’re called Quint… you’re Q?”

This time the answer was easy, even if breathing was still a struggle.  “Yes.”  He managed to drag in just enough air to say, barely above a whisper, “It’s always Q.”

The other boy immediately smiled, roguish but warm.  “Everyone calls me Jim Dench, but I’m James.”

“You’re…?”  Q’s ribs were breaking, crushing in on his lungs, even as an unquenchable happiness rose up inside of him.  

Winter-sky-blue eyes softened just a bit, and the other boy cocked his head and repeated with a rueful smile, “Yes, I’m _always_ James.  Although-”  He grimaced and dragged a hand back through his hair, making an absolute, golden mess of it that had Q’s face splitting nearly in half with a smile.  Jim/James went on ruefully, “-I’m not sure if my memory is really all there.  It took me this long to remember that you liked to visit my graves, and this is honestly the only grave I remember.  And I can’t help but thinking that your hair is too short.”  Despite his lanky build, this-James moved as cat-quick as before, and strode easily up to Q to eye first Q's haircut and then his own gravestone.  He frowned at it, perhaps really reading it for the first time - and maybe connecting it to the memory of his past life, James Bond, picking it out while still alive.  “This is damn eerie, you know that right?”

Q was still smiling so much his face ached.  He couldn’t take his eyes off the one person that mattered to him.  Had always mattered to him.  Would always matter to him.  “It takes some getting used to,” he admitted.  

This-James was still making adorably disgruntled expressions.  “Might take longer for me.  Am I supposed to remember a whole load of lives?  Because ever since I was little, I’ve remembered being a spy, but also that I’m _supposed_ to remember more, but to be honest - I don’t know if I could handle a whole lot more than that.”  Suddenly he looked at Q, more thoughtfully.  “How do you stand it?”

“Not well,” Q admitted, but he already felt lighter.  He’d had one foot in insanity when Silva had found him, in their last life, but a lot had been healed before he and James had closed that chapter.  When Q sidled closer, this-James didn’t even fidget at the proximity, accepting it as natural, and Q imagined he could feel another old scar fading away in his soul.  “If you remember your most recent life, you’d know that,” he nonetheless felt the need to remind.  Previous-James had gotten a very clear look at how poorly previous-Q was handling so many memories of lives.  

“Yeah…” this-James admitted, then let it peter off, looking back at the grey stone again.  Then he looked down, and his frown became more puzzled.  He knelt to touch a gloved finger to one of the rose-blooms.  “I…  I like roses, but only wild roses.  Other roses smell-”

“-So cloyingly sweet you could gag?” Q finished, and was gratified to see James’s look of shock and then pleasure as the blue-eyed youth looked up at him.  Q smiled giddily back.  He was glad for he topic-change.  “Yes, I know.  As James Bond, you weren’t much into flowers of any kind, so it never really came up - but this is a conversation we’ve had before.”

“And you?” this-James asked, so sincerely curious that Q’s heart gave a heady throb in his chest.  “Do you only like wild roses?”

If James had all of his memories of all of his lives, he'd known the answer to that already, but Q found that he didn’t care that this-James’s recollections started only one lifetime ago - that was enough.  Besides, Q wouldn’t wish all of his long memory on anyone.  This was more than enough.  So, smiling softly, Q filled his new companion in, “I used to like any roses, but then I realized that you hated the sugary smell of most of them.  So now my favorite roses are lilac-colored ones.”

“Why?”  

This-James was so curious; that wasn’t new, exactly, but it was a different take on the kind of secret-hunting that previous-James had had.  The familiar excitement of meeting James again for _almost_ the first time came back, like pure effervescence in Q’s veins.  “Because you told me that they smell more spicy than sweet, and that if you had to compromise, you’d almost say you loved them, too.”  

This-James’s smile was blinding.  He looked now at his gravestone without glaring at it, then looked back, with eyes too knowing for the age his young body had.  “I think that I’d have liked lilac-colored roses on my grave as much as wild ones,” he said quietly, “If I remember enough of myself, I think that I’d even have tolerated the most sugary-sweet roses in existence, for you.”

Q was trying very hard not to cry with happiness, and could only answer with a helpless little laugh that was terribly choked up.  “You remember,” was all he was able to eventually get out.

This-James… James, just…  _James_... nodded solemnly.  “Not a lot, but enough, I think.  Yeah?”

“Oh yes,” Q said, and finally gave in to the urge to drop to his knees and throw his arms around James’s neck, feeling like he’d come home when the other boy hugged him back like he knew him.

~^~

Epilogue

~^~

Magnetically driven cars whirred silently along the streets outside, driverless and sleek, like many misshapen eggs on a journey outside the coffee-shop window.  Inside the solar-panelled glass (clear from this side, but soaking up the sun from the other side), a figure with messy black hair nursed a cup of tea.  He hung his head over the steam for a moment, still getting used to having surgically corrected vision - sometimes he missed having the steam fog up his glasses.  He looked up when a well-dressed, broad-shouldered, blond figured entered the establishment and made a determined beeline towards him.  

“Where the hell have you been?” Q demanded in the same tone that many people could comment on the weather.  Beneath it, though, he was feeling the familiar supernova happiness that came with seeing James for the first time in a lifetime.

James was likewise taking it in stride, all of his memories intact - at least, all of his memories since James Bond, 007.  It seemed like he would never recall further back than that, which was perhaps for the best.  “Looking for you,” the blond-haired man huffed as he threw himself into a chair.  He somehow managed to make the movement look elegant, and Q smirked appreciatively.  Looking put-upon, James continued to complain, “You’d think with today’s technology that they’d have invented a better way of finding reincarnated husbands.”

As James awakened the dormant touchpad on the tabletop to order something, Q folded his hands one atop the other, resting his chin on them and saying idly, “Oh, we’re husbands, are we?”

Pale-blue eyes snapped up, confused.  “When did we stop being husbands?” James - or whatever name he was using this lifetime - asked cautiously.

Q waved a vague hand, replying, “Ever since our respective deaths in 2062 and 2065 nullified the paperwork.  Besides-”  Q folded his hands again but also leaned forward, a glint in his eyes as he murmured with a tight-lipped little smile, “There were past lives where I distinctly recall _wanting_ to be married, but you never proposed.”

James knew that smile; it wasn’t one to be messed with.  He also knew that while Q had recovered a lot since having another reincarnated immortal to confide in, he still carried scars from all of his lives alone - lives that James would probably never remember.  Still, in their most recent life, Q had started to trust Bond with some of the more painful stories, enough so that James knew that this was a subtle dig at pasts in which Q’s pining had gone unnoticed.  However, judging by the light in Q’s eyes, he wasn’t angry, so James dared to tease back, “Marriage has gone decidedly out of fashion in this age, you know.”

“And I decidedly don’t care.”  Q took a sip of his tea, looking imperious, and haughty, and incredibly unchanged somehow.  “I deserve a wedding.”

By the time Q looked up from his tea, James was smiling at him like there was nothing else in the entire world.  It made Q’s heart stop like it always had.  Always would.  Voice low, no longer teasing but as sincere as the summer sun, James said, “You deserve more than I could ever give you.  But-”  Now he shrugged, breaking the spell, playing again like one immortal with another, “-If you’ll settle for a big wedding with all the trimmings, I could do that again.  The reception was rather fun last time, as I recall, even if the whole thing was rather long.”

“We could have shortened the ceremony,” Q agreed.  

James’s smile turned just a bit wicked.  “Actually, I just hated having so much keeping me from the honeymoon.  If you wear another suit-jacket like that last one, I might disrobe you in a church.”

“Churches and suit-jackets are decidedly out of fashion in this age.”

“And I decidedly don’t care… so long as the end result is still you, in bed with me-”

Q didn’t hear the rest because he was laughing so hard, his happiness finally overflowing.  James joined him, and Q eventually controlled his laughing enough to reach across the table and grip James’s hand.  “Welcome back, James,” he whispered, meaning it with every fiber of his being.  

James’s eyes were alive with a kind of blue fire that said the feeling was mutual.  

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There, all fixed :) I promised that I wouldn't leave anyone with broken hearts - or, at least, that I'd fill the cracks in with gold (hint hint - if you don't know what the title means, give it a Google). I hope the ending made you cry - made you a bit hot under the collar - and made you laugh and walk away happy <3

**Author's Note:**

> I do sometimes miss tags - so if something comes up that should be tagged, but I've forgotten, don't hesitate to add it in the comments. This is my first of 5 fics for this years 00Q Festival, so I'll be posting like mad, but I'll also be lovingly reading all the comments that are left to me - and I am always very concerned with putting appropriate warnings on my fics, especially ones like this...
> 
> Next chapter will post in 1-3 days, internet permitting!


End file.
